Greg Abel's first full quarter running Berkshire Hathaway produced the clearest break yet from Warren Buffett's cash-hoarding final years. A portfolio disclosure filed Friday showed Berkshire spent $23.5 billion on stocks in the three months ended June 30 while selling just $3.7 billion worth, ending 14 consecutive quarters as a net seller.
The headline move was Alphabet. Berkshire's holdings in the Google parent rose 83 percent to roughly 106 million shares, valued at nearly $38 billion at the end of June. That vaulted Alphabet to third place in Berkshire's U.S. stock portfolio, trailing only its $66 billion Apple position and a $51 billion stake in American Express. Alphabet trades at $345.90 as of Thursday's close.
The position built through two transactions. Berkshire agreed in June to purchase $10 billion of Alphabet common stock in a private placement — buying shares directly from the company at a discount to the market price rather than through an exchange. Abel's team then bought an additional 19.6 million shares on the open market during the same quarter, a separate move the portfolio filing makes explicit.
The Alphabet commitment marks a departure from the Buffett era. Buffett avoided tech stocks for most of his career — his concession was Apple, which he came to view as a consumer brand rather than a technology company. Alphabet, the parent of the world's dominant search and advertising business, fits a different profile. Abel, likely working in consultation with Buffett in his role as Berkshire's non-executive chairman, is clearly willing to hold tech at scale.
Delta Air Lines received the second-largest fresh commitment. Berkshire lifted its Delta stake by 44 percent, bringing the position to $5.4 billion as of June 30. The airline sector fits the Abel pattern of capital-intensive businesses with durable market positions — Delta holds a leading share of premium domestic and transatlantic routes.
Beyond those two positions, the quarter's portfolio disclosure shows Berkshire added to Lennar and Macy's, while cutting Bank of America and Kroger sharply and closing its Constellation Brands position entirely. The filing does not break out exact dollar figures for those secondary moves.
The combined buying activity, alongside $4.5 billion in Berkshire share buybacks during the quarter — the highest quarterly repurchase figure since 2021 — pushed the cash pile from a record $380 billion to $365 billion over those three months. That $15 billion reduction is real progress, but the pile remains larger than it was a year before Buffett handed over the CEO role.
The counterargument on pace is worth examining. Strip out the $10 billion private placement with Alphabet — a negotiated deal that does not reflect open-market conviction in the same way — and Berkshire's open-market stock purchases last quarter were lower than in the first quarter of 2025. Abel was not broadly buying equities across the market; the Alphabet position is doing the heavy lifting on the headline deployment figure.
Berkshire's Q2 earnings, released last week ahead of the portfolio filing, confirmed the $20 billion net purchase figure. The earnings report also showed the $380 billion peak cash balance at the end of Q1, establishing the starting point for the quarter's deployment. The $365 billion ending balance is still, by historical standards, an extraordinary stockpile for a single operating conglomerate.
The scale comparison matters. Berkshire's previous largest quarterly stock outlay was in 2022, when Buffett deployed heavily into Occidental Petroleum and Chevron as energy prices spiked. The current quarter exceeds that episode on a net-purchase basis, though the character of the buying is different — a concentrated private-market tech deal rather than a broad sweep across sectors.
Abel took over as CEO at the start of 2026 after Buffett stepped back following decades leading the Omaha-based conglomerate. Buffett remains chairman. The division of authority — Abel running the day-to-day operations and capital allocation, Buffett providing oversight from the board — makes it difficult to attribute specific stock picks entirely to one man. The portfolio filing does not identify who approved individual positions.
What the filing does establish is direction. Berkshire under Abel is willing to take a $38 billion position in a single technology company, pay up in a private placement to get size quickly, and simultaneously buy back its own stock at the fastest rate in five years — all in a single quarter. The cash pile, which spent years building under Buffett's patient watch, is now declining. The pace of that decline, and where the next $365 billion goes, is the defining question of the Abel era.
