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Who really said it

Gold Gets Dug Out of the Ground; Then We Melt It Down, Dig Another Hole, Bury It Again

Attributed to Warren Buffett b. 1930 · American investor · Berkshire Hathaway chairman
Attributed Rights unconfirmed

Universally credited to a Buffett speech at Harvard in 1998, and entirely consistent with the case against gold he later made in writing he signed. But no transcript or recording of that talk has ever surfaced, and every supporting citation Quote Investigator located dates from 2003 — earliest a Mineweb.com article by Stewart Bailey of 4 March 2003, then a business report in The Times of London on 21 July 2003, five years after the event they describe.

Last verified 1 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Gold Gets Dug Out of the Ground; Then We Melt It Down, Dig Another Hole, Bury It Again” attributed to Warren Buffett, credited to a speech at Harvard in 1998, though no transcript has ever been located. Earliest documented appearance: Mineweb.com, 4 March 2003; earliest newspaper printing: The Times (London), 21 July 2003, Business, p. 21, per Quote Investigator. · Verbatim: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Warren Buffett — American investor · Berkshire Hathaway chairman since 1970. Theme: "Gold Gets Dug Out of the Ground; Then We Melt It Down, Dig Another Hole, Bury It Again". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The paper trail

Credited to
Warren Buffett, speech at Harvard, 1998
Primary source
None located — no transcript or recording of the 1998 talk
Earliest documented appearance
Stewart Bailey, “Is Buffett in gold?”, Mineweb.com, 4 March 2003 — circulated on Usenet, 5 March 2003
Earliest documented newspaper printing
The Times (London), 21 July 2003, Business, p. 21
Closest signed statement
Berkshire Hathaway 2011 shareholder letter

It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head. As printed in 2003

This is the wording as The Times printed it on 21 July 2003, in a business report that credited it to a Buffett speech at Harvard in 1998. Note that the short form circulating online — which drops “in Africa, or some place” — is the headline Quote Investigator gave its own investigation, not a wording any period source transcribes. The earlier Mineweb.com text of 4 March 2003 has “or someplace” as one word, repetitions drift between the two forms, and they often bracket the opening “It” as “[Gold].”

Quote Investigator: the full citation trail for the gold quote

How we verified this

  • 1877–1979 — the joke long predates Buffett. Quote Investigator documents a chain of anonymous newspaper items making the same complaint, beginning with “The Monetary Problem” in the Galveston Daily News of 9 August 1877, which already imagines a being from another world puzzling over the practice, and continuing through papers in Harrisburg (1885), Cleveland (1933), Omaha (1936), Chicago (1949), Ottawa (1952) and Palm Beach (1979). Quote Investigator ↗
  • 1931 — H. G. Wells puts it in a book. In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Wells wrote that mankind was getting gold out of mines “in order to bury it again in treasuries” and to no other perceptible end. QI’s citation of Wells, vol. 1, p. 399 ↗
  • 4 March 2003 — the earliest citation QI locates for the Buffett version. An article by Stewart Bailey on the mining site Mineweb.com, “Is Buffett in gold?”, carries the full wording — with “or someplace” as one word — and already pins it to “a speech given at Harvard in 1998.” QI found it reproduced in a Usenet post of 5 March 2003. Quote Investigator ↗
  • 21 July 2003 — the earliest printing in a major newspaper. A business report in The Times of London, “Demand for global listing helps to put new gloss on gold” (p. 21), carries the full wording and attributes it to a Harvard speech five years earlier. QI calls it “the earliest evidence known to QI of this quotation in a major newspaper,” and states it has not located a transcript of that speech. Quote Investigator ↗
  • Today — still not good enough for Wikiquote. The line sits in the “Unsourced” list on Wikiquote’s Warren Buffett talk page, tagged “Harvard, 1998,” under a note that such entries require citations to adequate sources before entering the main article — where it does not appear. Wikiquote talk page ↗

No rights status can honestly be asserted, because no first publication can be identified: there is no located transcript or recording of the 1998 talk, and the earliest documented appearances are 2003 press reports about it — a Mineweb.com article of 4 March 2003 and The Times of 21 July 2003 (Quote Investigator ↗). Either way no public-domain claim is available — every candidate source, from the alleged 1998 speech to the 2003 reports, is far too recent to have entered the public domain in the United States.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What’s actually wrong with the usual citation

Nobody has shown that Buffett did not say this — but almost everything people add to the quote when they repeat it is unsupported. Four separate claims travel with it, and none of them survives as sourcing: the venue and date are unverifiable, the short form is not a quotation at all, and two older writers got to the idea first. The only positive evidence sits outside this list, in the note below it.

“Harvard, 1998” Unverified

This is the sourcing everyone repeats, and it rests entirely on 2003 press reports — a Mineweb.com article of 4 March 2003, then The Times that July — written five years after the fact and citing nothing but the speech itself. Quote Investigator states plainly: “QI has not yet located a transcript of the supposed 1998 speech.” Read QI’s citation trail ↗

Quote Investigator’s own article title Not a quotation

The compressed form — “Gold gets dug out of the ground; then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again” — is the headline QI gave its investigation, not a wording any source transcribes. The circulating sentence opens “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place.” Compare the QI headline with the text it quotes ↗

Anonymous newspaper writers, from 1877 onward Precursor

The joke, complete with a puzzled observer from another world, was in print long before Buffett was born — QI documents it in the Galveston Daily News of 9 August 1877 and in half a dozen papers between then and 1979. See the precursor chain ↗

H. G. Wells, 1931 Precursor

In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Wells observed that gold was being mined only “to bury it again in treasuries” — the same point, sixty-seven years before the speech Buffett is said to have given. QI’s citation of Wells ↗

The one piece of positive evidence is direct but modest: Buffett’s assistant checked with him and told Quote Investigator, “He never writes out prepared speeches. But he has said things like this in the past.” That is a reason to keep the attribution — and a reason never to print it as though someone had the transcript. Quote Investigator, 25 May 2013 ↗

Context

Why this one is so hard to pin down

Gold has attracted this exact joke for as long as newspapers have printed jokes about money. The version everyone knows is Buffett’s — the metal hauled out of one hole, melted down, put into another hole, and guarded, while an observer from Mars scratches his head — and it gets quoted as though it were minuted. It was not. The speech it is pinned to has never surfaced.

What makes it impossible to simply dismiss is that Buffett really does argue this, at length, in prose he put his name to. In the 2011 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter he calls gold “neither of much use nor procreative,” notes that an ounce held for eternity is still just an ounce, and asks the reader to picture the world’s entire gold stock as a cube roughly 68 feet on a side — then to choose between that cube and all the cropland in America plus sixteen Exxon Mobils. The thought is documented. The famous sentence is not.

The thought is documented. The sentence is not.

The joke’s long, anonymous back catalogue

Quote Investigator traces the underlying gag back to an anonymous 1877 item, “The Monetary Problem,” in the Galveston Daily News, which already contains the outside observer: a visitor from another world, baffled at watching us dig a shining substance out of the earth at enormous cost. Comparable complaints follow in a Harrisburg paper in 1885 (about silver), the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1933, an Omaha paper in 1936, the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1949, the Ottawa Evening Citizen in 1952 and the Palm Beach Daily News in 1979.

The most respectable ancestor is H. G. Wells, who wrote in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) that mankind was mining gold only “to bury it again in treasuries.” None of this proves Buffett borrowed anything — it is the kind of observation many people reach independently — but it does mean the line cannot be treated as original coinage on the strength of the attribution alone.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Doubt Wisdom Work

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the gold quote, 1877 to 2003quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: every dated citation QI located, the missing 1998 transcript, and the reply from Buffett’s office.
Wikiquote talk page: Warren Buffetten.wikiquote.org

The quote sits here in the “Unsourced” list, credited to “Harvard, 1998,” awaiting a citation good enough for the main article.
Berkshire Hathaway 2011 shareholder letter (PDF)berkshirehathaway.com

Buffett’s own signed case against gold — the same argument in different words, and without the famous sentence.
Buffett’s 1998 talk to University of Florida MBA students (PDF)tilsonfunds.com

A transcript of a well-documented 1998 Buffett campus talk; it never mentions gold, which is what a documented 1998 speech looks like.
Warren Buffetten.wikipedia.org

Biography and dates: born 30 August 1930, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway since 1970, CEO until 1 January 2026.
The quote on Goodreads, with no citationgoodreads.com

An exhibit in how the line circulates: the wording, Buffett’s name, and no source of any kind.

The credited author

About Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett

b. 1930 · American investor · Berkshire Hathaway chairman since 1970

Warren Edward Buffett, born in 1930, is the American investor who built Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile business into one of the largest companies in the world. He has been its chairman since 1970 and was its chief executive until 1 January 2026, when Greg Abel succeeded him. His scepticism about gold is long-standing and genuinely on the record — which is precisely why a gold line that sounds like him can travel for decades without anyone checking where it came from.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Attributed to Warren Buffett, speech at Harvard, 1998; no transcript located. Earliest documented appearance: Stewart Bailey, “Is Buffett in gold?,” Mineweb.com, 4 March 2003 (circulated on Usenet, 5 March 2003). Earliest newspaper printing: “Demand for global listing helps to put new gloss on gold,” The Times (London), 21 July 2003, Business, p. 21 — both as cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Gold Gets Dug Out of the Ground; Then We Melt It Down, Dig Another Hole, Bury It Again,” 25 May 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Gold Gets Dug Out of the Ground; Then We Melt It Down, Dig Another Hole, Bury It Again’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/gold-gets-dug-out-of-the-ground-then-we-melt-it-down-dig/

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