Berkshire was a net seller of stocks in Buffett’s final quarter as CEO

2026-02-21 15:26:58

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Berkshire was a net seller of stock in Buffett’s last quarter as CEO

Berkshire has sold Apple shares in each of the last three quarters and in seven of the past nine three-month periods, reducing its shares by just over 75% since the summer of 2023.

However, Apple remains the largest stake in Berkshire stock at $60.3 billion based on Friday’s close.

However, Apple’s No. 2 sales helped American Express Closing the gap From about $150 billion to just under $8 billion.

It’s six straight quarters of sales for Bank of America, cutting shares of that stake by 75% since mid-2024.

Berkshire’s stake in Amazon.com was worth $2.2 billion at the end of the third quarter. It’s now down to $478 million after selling 7.7 million shares during the fourth quarter, a decline of 77%.

In 2019, when Amazon debuted in Berkshire’s portfolio with an $860 million position, Buffett went out of his way to… He told CNBC’s Becky Quick that it wasn’t his decisionHe didn’t think it was a great holding, and there was no “major personality change” that reversed his traditional aversion to technology stocks.

Baron suggests It was portfolio manager Todd Combs who bought the shares and the big discount may be related to it December departure To join JPMorgan Chase.

Investors were not deterred by Berkshire’s sales of the three stocks. They all finished higher during the week.

Buying oil and insurance

Berkshire increased its stake in Chevron by 6.6% during the fourth quarter, adding another $1.2 billion to the position based on the oil giant’s stock price at the end of the year.

That’s the biggest boost for any Berkshire stock in the fourth quarter, but there haven’t been any particularly significant changes to Chevron’s position over the past three years.

The rise in crude oil prices has helped raise Chevron’s share price by 20.7% since the beginning of the year, making the current value of the stake about $24 billion, compared to $19.8 billion on December 31.

It is No. 5 in value among Berkshire properties.

Chubb was the second-largest purchase of the quarter with a 9.3% increase in shares adding about $910 million to the value of the position based on the insurer’s December 31 stock price.

Berkshire’s 34.2 million shares are currently valued at about $11.4 billion, making it the eighth-largest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio.

Berkshire is taking a small step back in the newspaper business

The only stock added to Berkshire’s portfolio during the fourth quarter was a relatively small stake in The New York Times Company.

It is currently worth $395 million, up from $352 million at the end of the year thanks to a 12.4% jump in the newspaper’s share price.

The New York Times Building in Manhattan, New York, August 3, 2020.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

Buffett’s love of newspapers goes back a long way. He delivered The Washington Post and other Washington, D.C. newspapers. As a child, he bought a very lucrative stake in Berkshire’s Post in the 1970s, and had a close friendship with mail Publisher Katharine Graham worked closely with the editor of the small Berkshire-owned Omaha weekly magazine, which won an award. Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

But in 2020, Berkshire sold its newspaper holdingsincluding Buffett’s hometown daily, Omaha World-Heraldand Buffalo News, Berkshire’s ownership since 1977, to Lee Enterprises for $140 million.

Based on the relatively small size of the Times stake – it represents 0.1% of the value of Berkshire’s stock portfolio – it was almost certainly not a Buffett purchase, with portfolio manager Ted Weschler, or Todd Combs (before his departure) making the buyout decision.

While the Times purchase is hardly chump change by Berkshire standards, it is more than chump change $250 million paid by Jeff Bezos The Washington Post In 2013A price that was thought at the time to be four times the value of the newspaper.

Times Company’s current market cap is $12.6 billion, giving Berkshire a 3.1% stake.

Berkshire’s vote of confidence appears to have added to the Times’ momentum, as shares ended the week with a 6.9% gain at an all-time closing high near $78.

A complete list of Berkshire’s U.S. holdings as of December 31 appears below.

Berkshire settles federal wildfire claims

Berkshire Hathaway PacifiCorp It took two important steps this week to deal with the massive liability claims it faces due to wildfires in the West.

Friday, The Ministry of Justice announced The company agreed to pay $575 million to settle damage claims brought by the US government over six fires in California and Oregon in 2020 and 2022.

The government says PacifiCorp electrical lines started all six fires “due to negligence.” Its news release notes, “The claims resolved under this settlement are allegations only and liability has not been determined. PacifiCorp continues to deny liability for these fires.”

A Justice Department official was quoted as saying that the agreement “strikes a balance by addressing the government’s significant costs of fighting fires and loss of natural resources without preventing PacifiCorp from providing electricity at fair prices.”

A PacifiCorp statement The company has now settled “nearly 90% of known claims” for more than $2.2 billion, “providing certainty to customers and moving toward a financially healthy benefit,” the company says.

NASA’s MODIS satellite image shows wildfires in Oregon, US, on September 8, 2020. The image was taken on September 8, 2020.

Maxar Technologies | Via Reuters

Buffett & Berkshire about the Internet

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Highlights from the CNBC Buffet archives

How Berkshire Utilities Are Now Responding to Wildfire Threat (2025)

Greg Appel describes How Berkshire Utilities is working to reduce the risk that its equipment may contribute to wildfires.

Buffett: We could get out of the utility business because of wildfire liability

Becky Quick (transferring shareholder question): “Please discuss your strategy on how to protect our company from future liabilities due to wildfires blamed on our electric utility companies in the West.”

Warren Buffett: Well, that’s a very good question. And we made some mistakes in the past when we bought PacifiCorp in 2000, what, five?

Greg Appel: Yes.

Warren BuffettWalter Scott, David Sokol, and me, three guys — capitalists at heart — and we handle our own money.

But we made a mistake by not dividing it into the seven states we were buying. And he came – he came as a group, as it was not one state by another. And we – we’ve maintained the same thing – the same structure. And that was – that was a big mistake.

There’s – well, every part of the country is going to need electricity. And there will be places – where there is public electricity – where it would be foolish to operate privately owned electric utilities.

We will discover how this is resolved in a democratic country.

But these are the facts as they are now, I would say.

Greg?

Greg Appel: Yes. The reality is that the risks surrounding wildfires are that wildfires happen, and they are not going away. We know that. The risks may go up every year, so —

But what we can do to reduce the risk of this impacting our system, our underlying assurances and, unfortunately, the responsibilities that come with such events, we can change and manage that…

Then we take it further. And this is something that Warren and I have discussed many times, is that utilities are starting to recognize when we’re having these unusual weather events. Warren touched on the storms happening in Nebraska.

But they occur equally well – or important events occur – outside the West.

But when we have that, we get pretty good at saying, okay, we’ve got to manage the system differently. We will probably deactivate because there will likely be an event.

But the one thing we didn’t address — and this is closely related to the only significant event we had in 2020 at PacifiCorp — is that we didn’t deactivate the system as the fire approached, because our employees and the entire management team had been, their whole lives, trained to keep the lights on.

The last thing they want to do is turn off those lights and deactivate the system.

And after those events, as we really looked at how we could move forward to manage those assets and mitigate those risks, we clearly realized that, as a team, we had to deactivate those assets.