Berkshire breaks 14-quarter selling streak with $23.5B of stock buys — $10B went to 1 company at a private price

Rudro Chakrabarti

Sun, August 9, 2026 at 10:40 PM GMT+3 7 min read

On June 2, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) set the price on $18 billion of new stock it was selling to public investors, part of an $84.75 billion effort to raise money for its artificial intelligence buildout. Anyone who got shares in that sale paid $355.1982 apiece for the Class A stock.

Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) paid $351.81.

The Google parent had agreed the day before to sell Warren Buffett's company $10 billion of stock in a private placement — Alphabet sold the shares straight to Berkshire instead of running them through the public offering. Berkshire paid $351.81 for $5 billion of Class A shares and $348.20 for $5 billion of Class C shares, which carry no voting rights and trade a few dollars cheaper, according to Alphabet's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Public buyers in the sale running alongside it paid $355.1982 and $351.8018. The private sale closed June 4, the same day as the public one.

Must Read

Jeff Bezos backs a platform that lets anyone invest in rental homes for as little as $100 — 6 ways to build wealth like a landlord without actually being one
Dave Ramsey warns nearly 50% of Americans are making 1 big Social Security mistake. Here's what it is and 3 simple steps to fix it ASAP
Millionaires under 43 hold only 25% of their wealth in stocks. Here's where their money is actually going

Berkshire had owned Alphabet since the third quarter of 2025, and Alphabet described the placement as an addition to a stake Berkshire had been building since then.

The gap is $3.39 and $3.60 a share. Across the roughly 28.6 million shares in the placement, it comes to about $100 million. That one transaction accounts for more than 40% of every dollar of stock Berkshire bought in the quarter.

What Berkshire bought in the second quarter

Berkshire's second-quarter report, filed Aug. 8, showed the company buying more stock than it sold for the first time in 14 quarters. That ended a stretch of net selling that began in the fourth quarter of 2022 and outlasted Buffett's tenure as chief executive.

Net earnings, the noisier figure, roughly doubled to $25.67 billion. Operating earnings, which strip out the paper swings in Berkshire's stock portfolio and are the figure Buffett has long told shareholders to watch, rose 16% to $12.98 billion. Share buybacks jumped to $4.53 billion from $235 million in the first quarter. The cash pile — $397.4 billion at March 31, the most it had ever held — finally fell, to $365.5 billion.

Berkshire's filing gives six-month totals rather than quarterly ones; the quarterly split works out to roughly $23.5 billion of stock bought against about $3.7 billion sold.

Profit from writing insurance policies fell 13% and income from investing premiums fell 9%.

Why Berkshire paid less than Alphabet's public investors

Alphabet paid to sell stock to the public. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley led a group of 31 banks that took the $18 billion offering, distributed it and collected a fee. Alphabet told investors to expect about $17.8 billion left over once the banks' cut and the cost of the sale were paid, or roughly 1.1%. Public buyers had no say in the price.

Berkshire bought straight from the company. No syndicate, no fee. The discount it negotiated, 0.95% on the Class A shares and 1.02% on the Class C, runs close to what Alphabet would have paid the banks to move the same stock.

Alphabet kept about $351.25 a share from public buyers of the Class A stock and $351.81 from Berkshire. On the Class C shares it was $347.89 against $348.20. Across the 28.6 million shares in the placement, Berkshire's money was worth roughly $12 million more to Alphabet than the same shares sold to the public. Alphabet also gave Berkshire the right to resell the shares publicly later, which buyers in private deals don't automatically get.

Who made the Alphabet call, Buffett or Abel

Most early coverage of Berkshire's moves framed the quarter as Greg Abel's arrival on the battlefield. Abel, 64, took over as chief executive on Jan. 1 and spent his first quarter doing very little. That $235 million of buybacks was a rounding error against a company worth more than $1 trillion.

The biggest single item in the quarter was not his idea. Buffett, still chairman, told CNBC on July 15 that the Alphabet position was his call. "I initiated it," he said. In the same interview he returned to a regret he has aired for years, that Berkshire should have bought Google far earlier, and said he doesn't like Alphabet as much as at least four or five other businesses Berkshire already owns.

Buffett gave Abel credit elsewhere. Berkshire agreed on May 31 to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison at $72.50 a share, or roughly $6.8 billion, and Buffett publicly praised Abel's work on that deal. It closed July 24, which puts it in the current quarter rather than the one just reported.

What Berkshire's Alphabet stake is worth now

Berkshire bought well below Alphabet's peak. The stock closed at a record $402.38 on May 13, and the $351.81 Berkshire paid three weeks later was about 12.6% under that. Alphabet's Class A shares closed at $354.30 on Aug. 7, leaving that half of the placement up 0.7%. The Class C half is further ahead.

Alphabet is now one of Berkshire's five largest stock holdings, alongside American Express, Apple, Bank of America and Coca-Cola. Together those five account for 66% of Berkshire's stock holdings, up from 65% at the end of 2025.

How much of Berkshire's cash pile is still unspent

Berkshire ended June with $365.5 billion in cash and Treasury bills. In March it had $397.4 billion, the most it had ever held. It is still holding about 92 cents of every dollar it had three months earlier.

Two things made it spend at all, and neither was a call on the stock market. Google was raising $84.75 billion to build AI capacity and sold Berkshire a $10 billion piece of it directly. The timing belonged to Alphabet. The buybacks came down to a rule: Berkshire only repurchases its own shares when it judges the price low, and its price had been falling while the rest of the market rose.

Even then it spent less than expected. Barron's had modeled $5 billion to $11 billion of repurchases for the quarter and UBS analyst Brian Meredith forecast $8.5 billion. Berkshire came in at $4.5 billion, below the bottom of that range. It also kept selling, with the filing's six-month figures implying roughly $3.7 billion of stock went out the door in the quarter.

The one thing Berkshire bought without being asked was itself, and it kept buying after the quarter ended. The filing gives no July total, but Berkshire's share count shrank enough between June 30 and July 29 to imply roughly $3.3 billion more. Buffett, who says the Google deal was his idea, has also said there are four or five businesses Berkshire already owns that he likes better than Alphabet.

The filing that shows what else Berkshire bought lands around Aug. 14. So far the only stock Berkshire has backed hard is its own.