Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B) repurchased no stock at all in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, it spent $235 million. In the second quarter, it spent about $4.5 billion, roughly 19 times as much in three months.
At most companies, a repurchase is a routine capital return. At Berkshire Hathaway, it is a published opinion about price. The standing program, as described in the Q2 10-Q, permits repurchases "any time that Berkshire's Chief Executive Officer, after consultation with the Chairman of the Board, believes that the repurchase price is below Berkshire's intrinsic value, conservatively determined." Note the construction. Warren Buffett stepped down as chief executive on Jan. 1 and remains chairman; the filing now vests the decision in the CEO and gives the chairman a consultation. This is Greg Abel's call, and it is the first loud one he has made.
The filing shows what he was willing to pay. Berkshire bought no shares in April, then Class B stock at an average of $476.01 in May and $487.98 in June, alongside 478 Class A shares. BRK.B traded between roughly $464 and $500 over the quarter and closed Aug. 7 at $521.80. Abel, in other words, has told shareholders that Berkshire in the high $480s was below a conservative estimate of what it is worth.
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The number everybody else led with is real too. Berkshire bought roughly $23.5 billion of equities in the quarter against about $3.7 billion of sales, close to $20 billion of net buying, ending 14 consecutive quarters as a net seller. The streak checks out on the filings: it began in the fourth quarter of 2022, after a net-buying third quarter, and ran unbroken through the first quarter of 2026. It is a real break with the era in which Berkshire was shedding longtime Buffett positions.
The cash pile finally shrank to $365.5 billion on June 30 from a record $397.4 billion three months earlier. Coverage has been split on that March figure, with some outlets reporting $380 billion instead. Both are right, and they measure different things: $397.4 billion is the gross balance, and $380.2 billion is what is left after backing out $17.2 billion of unsettled Treasury bill purchases that sat in assets and liabilities simultaneously at quarter-end. The filing discloses the adjustment in a footnote.
One widely repeated claim does not survive the document. Several write-ups have said Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) displaced Apple (AAPL) as Berkshire's largest equity holding. The 10-Q says only that the five largest holdings at June 30 were "Alphabet Inc., American Express Company (AXP), Apple Inc., Bank of America Corporation (BAC) and The Coca-Cola Company (KO)" and that together they were 66% of a $323.8 billion portfolio. That list is alphabetical, as Berkshire's always is. Run the arithmetic instead: Apple at the Q1 share count and the June 30 close is worth roughly $66 billion, while the Alphabet stake, including June's private placement, comes to around $30 billion. The second-quarter 13F lands on Aug. 14 and will settle it.
Nor is this quite the swerve the framing implies. Berkshire took $10 billion of Alphabet stock directly from the company in June, at $351.81 for the Class A shares and $348.20 for the Class C, and it had been adding to that position since the third quarter of 2025. Buffett has publicly claimed the Alphabet decision as his own. Calling the quarter an Abel regime change overstates a shift that has been underway for a year.
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One caution on the profit line. Net earnings attributable to shareholders more than doubled to $25.67 billion, and roughly $10.9 billion of that is an unrealized mark-to-market gain on stocks Berkshire still owns, the number Buffett spent decades asking people to ignore, on the grounds that prices and business performance diverge. Operating earnings, the figure he preferred, rose 16.3% to $12.98 billion.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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