Billionaire David Tepper Is Short Apple And Even Bet Against Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. What Does He See?

Eric Bleeker

Tue, August 18, 2026 at 3:48 PM GMT+3 4 min read

Quick Read

Tepper placed puts on AAPL and BRK-B as one trade, since Berkshire's $66B Apple stake makes it a cheap, low-volatility proxy short.
Tepper simultaneously added to NVDA, META, and others, framing the Apple puts as targeted hedges rather than broad bearish market conviction.
Apple's $2.02 Q3 EPS included 11 cents from non-recurring tariff refunds, leaving a 35x P/E stock exposed on weakening underlying fundamentals.
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When David Tepper opens put positions against two of the most widely held names in America, I pay attention. According to Appaloosa's 13F filing (positions as of June 30, 2026, disclosed August 14, 2026), the firm initiated new put positions referencing 835,000 underlying Apple shares ($241,615,600 notional) on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and 25,000 underlying Berkshire Class B shares ($12,509,750 notional) on Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK-B) Class B shares. Let's dive into how significant these positions are and what Tepper could be seeing.

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Read the Filing Carefully Before You React

Before going any further, there's an important caveat about how to read 13Fs. A 13F discloses only the notional value of the underlying shares behind an option position. Strike prices, expirations, and premiums paid are not disclosed, so the actual capital at risk is unknown and almost certainly a fraction of those headline figures. The Berkshire position is not as large as it looks on paper. A put is a bearish or hedging exposure, not an outright short sale. We cannot know from the filing whether this is a directional bet, a hedge, or one leg of a spread.

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Why These Are Likely The Same Trade

Apple is Berkshire's largest disclosed equity position. Berkshire held 227,917,808 Apple shares valued at $65,950,296,923 at quarter-end and did not sell a single share. If you want to press a bearish view on Apple and extend it efficiently, puts on Berkshire Hathaway are a clean way to do it. The relative sizing supports this reading: the Apple notional is roughly 20x the Berkshire notional.

What I See In The Fundamentals

Apple's Q3 FY26 earnings report was flattered by non-recurring items. Gross margin of 50.1% included roughly 2 percentage points from tariff refunds, and diluted EPS of $2.02 included 11 cents from the same source. Cook himself called memory pricing "a 100-year flood... with exponential increases". At a 35 trailing P/E and a $322.28 analyst target sitting below recent prints, the risk/reward is unfriendly. AAPL is already down 6.5% over the past month.

Berkshire has its own problems. FY25 operating earnings slipped to $44.49B from $47.44B, insurance underwriting collapsed to $1.56B from $3.41B, and Q2 FY26 net income fell 16.65% YoY. Greg Abel is buying tech at highs, including a $10B Alphabet private placement. Berkshire's beta of 0.87 makes it a cheap way to hedge Apple exposure without paying full tech volatility premiums.

Tepper's Apple put was his largest addition last quarter in notional terms, but we've already explained why options exposure is overstated on 13-Fs. While Tepper sold out of SanDisk (Nasdaq: SNDK) entirely last quarter, his second largest holding is Micron (Nasdaq: MU). If Tepper maintains a view that memory pricing will stay elevated for longer, Apple is an ideal short candidate at elevated prices. We don't know what price Tepper bought his put options at (that's not disclosed on the 13-F), but Apple was trading above $315 per share in early June and as low as $275 in early June. Earlier in the quarter, Apple's share price was even lower.

The Bottom Line

Tepper's book stayed constructive elsewhere. He added to Amazon, TSMC, NVIDIA, Meta and Alphabet, and opened new positions in CoreWeave, Broadcom, Boeing and SpaceX. That looks like targeted portfolio hedging on the two names most exposed to a memory pricing. However, the bottom line is that this doesn't appear to be as much of a high conviction bet as you'd infer from seeing Apple Puts were Tepper's largest buy last quarter. That's a notional value, which likely overstates his conviction in the trade.