Warren Buffett Joins Twitter B

By Erik Holm and Anupreeta Das

Pigs aren’t flying, lambs aren’t lying down with lions, and hell isn’t getting any cooler. But Warren Buffett is joining Twitter.

(It’s official. Buffett published his first tweet at 12:20 p.m. Eastern Time.)

Buffett, the chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. who once admitted he didn’t know how to check his voicemail , is being dragged into the social-media age by his friends at Fortune. He’s sitting down for an interview with the magazine at noon for a panel called “Warren Buffett on Women and Work…and other Wisdom.”

The magazine is billing it as his first-ever interview to incorporate social media. And in preparation for the big day, Buffett’s assistant revealed the billionaire investor is setting up a Twitter account and will author his first tweet at some point today.

And she confirmed that existing Twitter accounts purporting to be Buffett, including one that’s been telling over 127,000 followers to “stay tuned” for news since 2009, are all bogus.

With powerful friends like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates able to retweet pronouncements from the Oracle of Omaha, expect Buffett’s follower count to climb quickly in the days ahead.

Buffett’s foray into the Twittersphere is notable in part because of his professed aversion to technology. He once said he missed a message about a potential deal to bail out Lehman Bros. before it collapsed because he didn’t know how to check the voicemail on his cell phone. For years, he repeatedly declined Gates’ attempts to send someone over to set up a computer in his home. And he still doesn’t have a computer on his desk at his office.

But signing up for a Twitter account is no guarantee that Buffett will become a regular and sustained user of the micro-blogging service. Carl Icahn launched a blog to chronicle his thoughts on corporate governance, and even hired a reporter from Reuters to contribute, but the project lasted for less than a year. The site, called The Icahn Report , hasn’t been updated since 2009.

But Buffett’s folksy aphorisms seem like they could be a good fit for Twitter. As Buffett once (almost) said: “B fearful when others r greedy. B greedy when others r fearful. #WordsToLiveBy”