Billionaire Jeff Bezos once asked Warren Buffett why so few people copy his strategy—now he's backing $7 billion Liverpool FC | Fortune
From Tom Brady to Snoop Dogg, American billionaires, CEOs and celebrities are buying into English football—or as they would call it, soccer. In fact, over half of the Premier League’s 20 clubs are currently majority-owned by U.S. investors. And now, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the latest to invest in Europe’s biggest sport.
That’s because the consortium 1892 Holdings—led by Bezos, British-Indian millionaire businessman Amit Bhatia and billionaire Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin—has just bought 38% of Liverpool Football Club (FC) from the club’s current owner Fenway Sports Group for around £2 billion (around $2.7 billion).
It’s a drop in Bezos’ fortune, who, with a $273 billion net worth, is the third richest person on the planet. But it’s not without its risks.
Although Liverpool FC’s currently worth between £5 billion and £6 billion (around $6.8 to $9.5 billion), when FSG bought it for £300m (around $409 million) in 2010, the club was, according to its CEO Billy Hogan, “literally on the brink of bankruptcy.”
And while Liverpool’s in a strong financial position today, Bezos is buying into his first football club at a period of turbulence: They are trying to bounce back from a disappointing fifth-place finish in the top flight last season; Its manager, Arne Slot, was sacked as a result.
But the deal is structured as a long-term bet—a minority stake now in an iconic team, with the option to take majority control within 12 months—and that patience lines up with an investment philosophy Bezos has credited to somebody else entirely: Warren Buffett.
Bezos has long credited the legendary investor, Buffett, as a mentor. The chairman and former CEO of the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway has long shouted out about the benefit of investing for the long haul: For many years, Buffett has preached parking your money in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund and not touching it again, rather than trying to outsmart the market by picking individual stocks.
It’s a philosophy so simple that Bezos once asked Buffett directly why more people don’t just copy it.
“Why don’t more people copy your investment strategy? It’s not that difficult to understand in principle,” Bezos said he asked Buffett, speaking at the America Business Forum in 2025.
Buffett’s one-line answer was blunt. “He said, ‘Jeff, that’s easy. My approach is a get-rich-slowly scheme.’ And people don’t like those, but there’s a lot of truth in that for everything.”
And that’s an ethos that Bezos says he himself has stuck by: “If you can think in terms of seven years instead of three years, and you can defer gratification and think long term, that will give you a head start against all of your competitors, because most people can’t do that.”
So, if Bezos takes his own advice, Liverpool fans can expect him to stick around for at least seven years.
Orianna Rosa Royle is the Success associate editor at Fortune, overseeing careers, leadership, and company culture coverage. She was previously the senior reporter at Management Today, Britain's longest-running publication for CEOs.