On Friday, Berkshire Hathaway’s quarterly Form 13F appeared on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission website and immediately sent trading screens into overdrive. The filing showed that Warren Buffett’s conglomerate bought 17.85 million Class A shares of Alphabet Inc. during the third quarter, an outlay of about $4.33 billion that became the firm’s tenth-largest equity position, reported Business Insider Markets. Within minutes, Alphabet’s stock rose 1.7 percent in after-hours trading, and volume jumped more than 700 percent, a reminder of how closely Wall Street still followed every Berkshire move.
Apple still formed the backbone of Berkshire’s public-stock portfolio at roughly $60.7 billion, or about 24 percent of the total, according to the Financial Times. That dominance narrowed because Berkshire cut 42 million Apple shares—around 15 percent—in the same quarter, continuing a reduction that began last year. The sales helped push Berkshire’s cash reserves in Omaha to a record $381.7 billion.
The Apple trim surprised some investors because Buffett had long framed the iPhone maker as a consumer-products company rather than a technology play, a view that justified its large weighting. By contrast, Alphabet once sat in what Buffett called the too-hard basket, as he often avoided growth stocks he could not easily understand. That history made the $4.33 billion purchase feel like a turning point just months before the 95-year-old planned to step away from daily control of the $865 billion empire he led for six decades.
Buffett told shareholders he would retire as chief executive at year-end and stop writing the annual report. Vice-Chairman Greg Abel, already running the group’s non-insurance operations, is slated to take the helm on 1 January 2026, though he has begun sharing portfolio oversight. Investors therefore viewed the Alphabet stake as a possible preview of Berkshire’s strategy after Buffett.
Market watchers suspected the buy order came from portfolio managers Todd Combs or Ted Weschler, the lieutenants hired more than a decade ago. The pair opened Berkshire’s Amazon position in 2019 and steadily nudged the conglomerate toward selected technology holdings. People close to the firm noted that the new Google stake was nearly twice the size of the existing Amazon position, a sign that large-cap tech no longer violated Berkshire’s value approach.
Alphabet rallied more than 40 percent this year as demand for artificial-intelligence services boosted its cloud division, which reported $15.2 billion in revenue and beat analyst estimates. The momentum appeared to overcome Buffett’s earlier hesitation. At the 2019 shareholder meeting, he and the late Charlie Munger admitted they had screwed up by not buying Google earlier. We could see in our activity how well advertising on Google works. And we just sat there and sucked our thumbs, Buffett said then. That regret now seemed addressed.
Despite the new holding, the filing showed Berkshire remained a net seller of stocks for the twelfth straight quarter, trimming Bank of America, Verisign, and DaVita while exiting homebuilder D.R. Horton. It added about $1.2 billion to insurance group Chubb and raised its Domino’s Pizza stake by 13 percent, moves aligned with Buffett’s long-time preference for cash-rich consumer and insurance franchises.
Analysts called the Alphabet purchase both a vote of confidence in Google’s AI efforts and a partial hedge against Berkshire’s slimmer Apple exposure. Some on Wall Street warned of excess in AI-linked names, yet data from Business Insider Markets showed 37 analysts rated Alphabet a strong buy with an average target price of $312.
It remained unclear whether the Google bet would be the last major swing by the Oracle of Omaha or the first unmistakable stamp of Combs and Weschler on Berkshire’s future, but the message was evident: the company that once avoided Silicon Valley now believed certain technology platforms generated the durable cash flows Buffett always prized. It’s so much fun because you get the money up front, you know, and then you find out if you did something stupid afterward, Buffett quipped at the 2024 shareholder meeting.
Produced with the assistance of a news-analysis system.