There are few more painful harbingers of a sullied M&A process than what befell Paramount Global last week: the announcement that two of the company’s largest institutional shareholders had unloaded stock at that fraught moment between deal rumor-mongering and the announcement of any such deal. In other words, they sold before the stock traded up after an agreed-upon sale. That’s pretty unusual. 

It turns out that during the fourth quarter of 2023, Warren Buffett sold 30.4 million shares of Paramount, or about one-third of his stake in the company. I’ve never quite understood why Buffett bought into the stock in the first place, but I’ve long posited that his heirs-apparent convinced him to do it, he went along with their call, and he’s been annoyed at them ever since. (Anyway, Buffett didn’t respond when I asked recently.) It also turned out that John Rogers Jr. over at Mellody Hobson’s Ariel Investments, which owned 11.33 million Paramount shares at the end of the third quarter of 2023, reduced the firm’s stake down to 11 million shares, or 3 percent, in the fourth quarter.