Berkshire Hathaway’s surprising new tech stake

2025-11-15 12:13:29

With Warren Buffett set to step down as CEO at the end of next month, he has told shareholders that he will “keep quiet”, but only “kind of”.

More on the Thanksgiving message, which looks like it could become a major annual tradition, below.

Firstly:

Surprise share

There was a notable surprise at Berkshire Hathaway A snapshot of the stock portfolio at the end of the third quartert, released after the closing bell on Friday.

Someone in Omaha bought more than 17.8 million Class A shares in Google’s parent company, alphabet.

It is currently valued at $4.9 billion, making it the largest Q3 addition in dollar terms.

The news sent the stock up 3.5% in after-hours trading.

At this point, we don’t know who made the call.

Buffett usually makes purchases of this size, but it doesn’t feel like his kind of stock.

It’s up 51.3% year to date, including a 37% rise in the third quarter.

He also has traditionally stayed away from technology stocks. (Apple is a consumer products company.)

in Berkshire meeting 2019, Buffett and Charlie Munger lamented that they “made the mistake” of not buying Alphabet earlier because “they were able to see how successful Google Ads was in our own operations. We just sat there sucking our thumbs.”

On that day, the stock price was around $59, and they gave no indication that they were ready to correct their mistake.

New CEO Greg Appel is not burdened by this history, and Buffett has turned many of his duties over to him.

Or it could be one or both of the portfolio managers, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs.

Stay tuned.

It’s no surprise that it sold out

Alphabet was the largest Q3 addition by a wide margin at $4.3 billion, based on the Sept. 30 price, well ahead of Alphabet’s $1.2 billion increase. Chubb.

Biggest declines apple and Bank of AmericaAnd he predicted it Hints In Berkshire’s 10-Q for nearly two weeks.

(the Verisign It was a discount It was unveiled in early August.)

Apple’s position in Berkshire was reduced by about 15%, or $10.6 billion, to about 238 million shares.

It’s down 74% since Berkshire started selling two years ago.

But Apple remains Berkshire’s largest stock position at $64.9 billion, representing 21% of the current value of the portfolio.

Bank of America’s cut was smaller, at just 6.1%, or about $1.9 billion.

The remaining 238 million shares are currently valued at $29.9 billion, Berkshire’s third-largest position, and constitute nearly 10% of the current value of the portfolio.

They have been reduced by 43% since early last year.

A complete list of Berkshire’s Q3 13F is shown below.

“somewhat”

a lot to the Headlines On news stories about Warren Buffett Thank you letter Monday included this quote: “I will remain silent.”

But there was another phrase that followed that line near the top of the letter, and got its own paragraph: “Sort of.”

Warren Buffett speaks during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska on May 3, 2025.

CNBC

Starting next year, Greg Appel, “a great manager, hard worker and honest communicator,” will write the annual shareholder meeting and answer questions at the annual meeting. Buffett plans to sit on the floor with other managers.

But, he wrote, “I will continue to talk to you and my children about Berkshire through my annual Thanksgiving letter.”

This year’s letter was just over seven pages, compared with about three last year, and looked like the annual letters he had been writing for decades, with sections on the importance of luck, getting older, his admiration for Berkshire shareholders, the many friends he had made over the years in Omaha, and his complete confidence in Abel’s ability to run the company.

He also revealed that while he was hospitalized as a child, he was given a fingerprint kit and proceeded to take fingerprints from the nuns taking care of him, because “one day the nun might go wrong, and the FBI will find out that they neglected to fingerprint the nuns.”

(CNBC.com This summary)

The latest is his plan to “accelerate the pace of lifetime gifts” to the three foundations run by his children, who, like Buffett, are aging. (Ages 72, 70, and 67).

He wants to “improve the likelihood of disposing of what will essentially be my entire estate before replacement trustees take their place.”

But he also “wants to hold on to a significant amount of A shares so that Berkshire shareholders can gain the comfort with Greg that Charlie and I have long enjoyed.”

The result, at least for this year, is an increase in the amount of Class B shares (converted from Class A) going to each corporation to 400,000 shares from 300,000 shares last year.

Including a fourth, unchanged donation to a foundation named after his late wife, total gifts to date rose 17% to $1.3 billion.

Playing second fiddle: Class B shares are up 4% since last year’s gifts.