The first acquisition of the Abel era: homebuilding firm Taylor Morrison with a price tag of nearly $7 billion.
Berkshire already owns Clayton, among others, and has invested in Lennar, so the homebuilding sector is familiar to them.
33 Likes
The cash is slowly being put to work; Berkshire has purchased $10 billion worth of Alphabet shares.
Berkshire Hathaway is deepening its bet on artificial intelligence and one of the industry’s dominant players, investing an additional $10 billion in Alphabet through a private stock purchase.
Alphabet said Monday it reached an agreement to sell $5 billion of its Class A shares to Berkshire at $351.81 apiece and another $5 billion of Class C stock at $348.20 per share.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/berkshire-hathaway-alphabet-investment.html
12 Likes
Let’s frame my thoughts as a question. There was mention above about “putting the cash to work.” Is that actually happening, or are they merely preventing the cash pile from growing further? How much cash flow does Berkshire Hathaway generate per quarter?
To my eyes, it now looks like Buffett has handed over the reins, and Abel’s influence is starting to show in the operations. If these purchases aren’t even enough to keep the cash balance stable, we are entering interesting territory. Buffett has said in the past that eventually, we’ll reach a point where there simply isn’t enough to buy on the market. One starts to wonder about the future themselves, now that even the “dividend party” chairman Verneri_Pulkkinen is reporting buys.
11 Likes
Berkshire Hathaway is one of the world’s most disciplined, if not the most disciplined, capital allocators. I don’t believe Abel is under any pressure to put cash to work just for the sake of it. If the cash position (or rather, the Treasury investments) were to swell to, say, 500 billion, so what? The stock market will dip eventually. 
Unlike in the 2010s, money is now becoming a scarce commodity due to rising interest rates, the investment arms race among Big Tech, and increasing government debt.
In this environment, the strategic value of Berkshire’s cash pile grows day by day.
25 Likes
Good question; money is certainly pouring into the company from all directions, so they are facing a “positive problem.” Now, in just two days, Berkshire put 17 billion into investments (Alphabet and Taylor Morrison); it will be interesting to see what happens next. Will there be more acquisitions of entire companies, or will Berkshire quietly buy up shares from the market, and we’ll see from the next report where the money has been spent.
My own guess is that they will buy more Tokyo Marine (I don’t believe a 2.5% stake in the company is “enough,” since other Japanese companies have been bought up to around 10%) and probably something from the US as well. But of course, these are all quite small (a few billion at most) compared to the giant cash pile, so a truly large deal could also be a possibility.
6 Likes
In the midst of this AI hype and while waiting with a small pile of cash, I played around with the idea of buying BRK. I was surprised to find that you have to pay a 2% premium for the A-share compared to the B-share (the A-share is equivalent to 1,500x the B-share in economic terms). A small premium regarding voting rights is probably quite common when multiple share classes are involved, but as a retail investor, that is quite attractive.
2 Likes
I wouldn’t exactly talk about a retail investor anymore if one can afford to buy even a single A-series share 
31 Likes
I have owned and followed Berkshire for over 20 years, and there have always been dissenting voices claiming the company’s cash pile is supposedly too large. I suppose it grows because money flows in by the millions every minute, and the pace improves year after year! We aren’t quite at Scrooge McDuck levels yet: “if I lose a billion a minute, I’ll be bankrupt in 600 years,” but that’s the direction we’re headed. I predict the cash position will remain “too large” from here to eternity. It is, however, largely funded by the negative-interest “float” of BH’s insurance companies, and there are no signs that their combined ratio will exceed 100% in the future.
13 Likes
I’m still considering a strategy of piggybacking on Berkshire’s new investments—that is, monitoring what they are buying right now and using that to get ideas for potential investment targets. Many of these have performed much better than Berkshire itself in recent years; I’m not sure if there has been a formal study to confirm this. A couple of examples:
Perhaps the most well-known new investment was Apple, which Berkshire started buying in 2016. If you jumped in when the information was disclosed, the return has been significantly better than Berkshire’s, even if you had sold part of the position since then (following their lead).
Alphabet is such a recent acquisition that it’s too early to draw any conclusions there.
Precision Castparts performed quite excellently until Berkshire bought it (at a premium) off the market. Ingersoll-Rand roughly tenfold in Berkshire’s portfolio. The Japanese investments have been a success story.
Of course, there have been misses, such as IBM, and DaVita’s share price performance has been a bit lackluster in recent years. But even these haven’t been catastrophes.
The big successes in new investments have certainly piqued my interest; as a whole, they have performed quite excellently, even after they were publicly disclosed.
6 Likes
I used to follow Berkshire’s purchases quite closely. It is quite interesting how the media highlights new buys, yet the analysis usually doesn’t take much of a stand on the size of the position. Once a stock has been bought, subsequent additions receive varying degrees of attention. For example, Apple was highlighted as a buy in Q1/2016, and then when concerns arose regarding iPhone sales, no one was really interested in Berkshire’s purchases anymore. People were more inclined to doubt the “old man’s” ability to understand technology and questioned whether he was even the one buying. The major purchases were then made in 2016/Q4 and 2017/Q1.
Well, another good example of this is Chubb. Buffett has been buying the company since 2023, but have you even noticed it?
This just came to mind immediately when it was mentioned above that Alphabet is a recent acquisition and one shouldn’t draw conclusions yet. It has been bought quite vigorously; it definitely brings back a sense of déjà vu compared to Apple:
(I bought Chubb myself, but sold out. Dividend taxation is complicated for a Finn.)
6 Likes
Alphabet is indeed a large investment; after that reported figure, Berkshire bought another 10 billion worth of it. By “drawing conclusions,” I mainly meant the returns—meaning Alphabet’s share price performance—rather than the significance of the purchase itself. With Apple, Berkshire certainly hit the bullseye, even though the purchases were questioned a bit back in the day.
Good point regarding the additional investment. I understand that interest was the driving factor, and I wanted to highlight what is actually significant for the portfolio. There is quite a lot of “noise” in the portfolio, and for example, I think DaVita is the kind of investment where it’s questionable whether it has any impact or not. It has been in the portfolio for a long time, and the business is likely good since it’s left there to mature.
Berkshire has invested quite heavily in oil (Chevron and Occidental Petroleum), and they haven’t been successes so far. It’s a rather interesting situation, as one would think these would be “glory days” given the situation in Hormuz; compared to, say, our local Neste, you would expect there to have been some returns. It feels like a miss, but at the end of the year, we might be of a different opinion Chubb as an individual investment was pretty lackluster, but the old gentleman just sits on his hands and it’s starting to look better little by little.
1 Like
One thing that makes me wonder about the cash position is its significance as a strategic asset – in absolute terms, the cash pile is so large that it can be used to make major moves in the business world when the right opportunity arises. From a portfolio perspective, it is “low-yielding” wealth, but in a strategic sense, it can be a very valuable asset precisely because of its massive scale.
Berkshire can access opportunities that are simply not available with smaller amounts of capital. Therefore, the cash (or rather, the fixed-income investments it consists of) shouldn’t be viewed merely as a conventional asset class – due to its sheer size, its importance in certain situations can be much greater than just a pile of liquid cash.
3 Likes
Indeed. It has certainly crossed my mind that due to Trump’s trade war and other conflicts, as well as NATO politics, trust in the country is being tested. Buffett considers trust to be the most important factor of all. He has been involved in quite some messes. At Long Term Capital Management, he became CEO unintentionally, and from the financial crisis, I remember the rescue of several banks. Goldman Sachs repurchased preferred shares (etuoikeutetut osakkeet) while gritting their teeth even a couple of years later. Wells Fargo swallowed Wachovia, and Buffett was busy in the arrangements making investments. Bank of America seized Merrill Lynch. In both, Buffett seemed to have a 10% ownership, which could not be exceeded without special permission. Curiously, confidence in the banks returned when Buffett stepped in behind them. Personally, it never even occurred to me to invest in any American bank. It was certainly a lesson: Be greedy when others are fearful.
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
It has crossed my mind that the great master might still teach this to Trump. The USA is suitably indebted, and a loss of confidence is a bad thing. Now there has been quite some volatility in interest rates, and China and Japan are selling US bonds at a rapid pace. I’m waiting for Buffett to step in for Trump to calm the US debt situation and fire off the words: “Never bet against America.”
3 Likes
Sharing this article here as well, since it is so strongly related to Berkshire that it belongs in this thread:
4 Likes