Buffett very rarely uses such absolutes in a literal way. He has said to buy with a mindset that you plan to hold a stock forever. It's meant as a mental tool,

Buffett very rarely uses such absolutes in a literal way. He has said to buy with a mindset that you plan to hold a stock forever. It's meant as a mental tool, to keep you from over-trading, bouncing in and out of positions too frequently. It's meant to spur greater discipline and better investigation of what you're buying. He's very much an advocate of selling if the situation warrants it. He frequently sells stocks and doesn't need the money. He dumped his airline holdings (he owned 10% of all the majors) during the pandemic while sitting on ~$130 billion in cash. He sold a large chunk of Wells Fargo recently (a stock he has liked for a long time). He previously bought and sold Oracle, IBM, Walmart, and so on. He has made several mistakes messing with oil companies, including a bad one with ConocoPhillips in 2006 before the commodity bubble crash. Buffett is always willing to sell, under two scenarios: 1) he comes to the conclusion that he was wrong in the assessment that prompted the purchase (a mistake on his part, as in Conoco); 2) something substantial changes about the the company or its context for the negative (or otherwise in a way that he isn't able to understand, something outside his lane).