Berkshire was a net seller of stocks in Buffett’s final quarter as CEO
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Berkshire was a net seller of stock in Buffett’s final quarter as CEO
Berkshire has sold Apple shares in each of the last three quarters and seven of the last nine quarters, sending its shares down a little more than 75% since the summer of 2023.
Despite this, Apple remains Berkshire’s largest stock holding, valued at $60.3 billion as of Friday’s close.
But Apple sales helped #2 American Express close the gap It fell from almost $150 billion to just under $8 billion.
That’s six straight quarters of selling for Bank of America, with shares down 75% since mid-2024.
Berkshire’s Amazon.com shares were valued at $2.2 billion at the end of the third quarter. That figure fell to $478 million, a 77% cut, following the sale of 7.7 million shares in the fourth quarter.
When Amazon first appeared in Berkshire’s portfolio in 2019 with an $860 million position, Buffett went out of his way. Tell CNBC’s Becky Quick it’s not her decisionHe didn’t think it was a significant holding, and no major “personality change” had reversed his traditional aversion to tech stocks.
Barron’s suggests The person who bought the shares was portfolio manager Todd Combs, and the big drop may have been related to his shares. December departure to join JPMorgan Chase.
Investors were not deterred by Berkshire’s sale of three stocks. All of them finished the week with an increase.
Buying oil and insurance
Berkshire increased its stake in Chevron by 6.6% in the fourth quarter, adding $1.2 billion to its position based on the oil giant’s year-end stock price.
That’s the biggest fourth-quarter gain for any Berkshire stock, but there hasn’t been a particularly significant change in its Chevron position over the past three years.
High crude oil prices have helped Chevron’s share price rise 20.7% since the beginning of the year, with the stock’s current value rising from $19.8 billion to almost $24 billion on Dec. 31.
It ranks 5th among Berkshire’s stocks in terms of value.
Chubb was the second-largest acquisition of the quarter, with a 9.3% stake increase that added about $910 million to the value of the position based on the insurer’s Dec. 31 share price.
Berkshire’s 34.2 million shares are now worth almost $11.4 billion, making it the eighth-largest holding in Berkshire’s equity portfolio.
Berkshire takes small step into newspaper business
The only stock added to Berkshire’s portfolio in the fourth quarter was a relatively small stake in The New York Times Company.
Thanks to a 12.4% increase in the newspaper’s share price, its value has now increased from $352 million to $395 million at the end of the year.
The New York Times building is seen on August 3, 2020 in Manhattan, New York.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Buffett’s love of newspapers goes back a long way. he delivered Washington Post and other D.C. newspapers During his childhood, he bought a very profitable Post stock for Berkshire in the 1970s and had a close friendship with it. to mail He worked closely with publisher Katherine Graham and the editor of a small Berkshire-owned weekly magazine, Omaha. Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
But in 2020 Berkshire sells newspaper assetsIncluding Buffett’s hometown newspaper, Omaha World ReporterAnd Buffalo News, Since 1977, a property in Berkshire was transferred to Lee Enterprises for $ 140 million.
Given the relatively small size of Times stock (it accounts for 0.1% of the value of Berkshire’s stock portfolio), this is almost certainly not a Buffett purchase; portfolio manager Ted Weschler or Todd Combs (before he left) made the buy decision.
While the Times buyout wasn’t nearly as much money by Berkshire standards, Jeff Bezos was paid $250 million Washington Post in 2013It was a price thought to be four times the value of the newspaper at the time.
Times Company’s current market capitalization is $12.6 billion, with Berkshire owning a 3.1% stake.
Berkshire’s vote of confidence appeared to boost the Times’ momentum; shares closed the week up 6.9%, near an all-time high of $78.
The full list of Berkshire’s U.S. holdings as of December 31 is included below.
Berkshire utility settles federal wildfire claims
Berkshire Hathaway PacifiCorp It took two significant steps this week to deal with the massive liability claims it faces for wildfires in the West.
on friday, Ministry of Justice announced The utility agreed to pay $575 million to settle damage claims filed by the U.S. government related to six wildfires in California and Oregon in 2020 and 2022.
The government said PacifiCorp’s power lines “negligently” started all six fires. The news release states that “the claims resolved by this settlement are allegations only and no determination of liability has been made. PacifiCorp continues to deny liability for these fires.”
A Justice Department official was quoted as saying the agreement “strikes a balance by addressing the government’s significant wildfire costs and loss of natural resources without preventing PacifiCorp from providing electricity at fair prices.”
A. PacifiCorp statement It says the company has now resolved “nearly 90% of known claims” for more than $2.2 billion, “providing certainty to customers and progressing towards a financially sound service.”
A NASA MODIS satellite image shows wildfires in the US state of Oregon on September 8, 2020. The picture was taken on September 8, 2020.
Maxar Technologies | via Reuters
BUFFETT & BERKSHİRE ON THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
How Berkshire’s utilities are now responding to wildfire threat (2025)
Greg Abel tells How are Berkshire facilities working to reduce the risk of their equipment contributing to wildfires?
BECKY QUICK (quoting shareholders’ question): “Please discuss your strategy for how you will protect our company from future liability for wildfires for which our electric utility companies in the West are responsible.”
WARREN BUFFET: Yes, that’s a very good question. And – and we’ve made some mistakes in the past, too, when we acquired PacifiCorp in 2000, what, five?
GREG ABEL: Yes.
WARREN BUFFET: Walter Scott, David Sokol and I are three guys who are capitalists at heart, and we deal with our own money.
But we made a mistake by not dividing it into the seven states we purchased from. And he came; It came with a non-state-by-state aggregation. And we kept the same structure. And this was a big mistake.
Every part of the country will need electricity. And there will be places where it would be very stupid to work where public electricity is privately owned.
And we will learn how to solve this in democracy.
But I can say that these are the facts as they stand now.
Greg?
GREG ABEL: Yes. The truth is that the risk associated with wildfires, that is, the occurrence of wildfires, is not going away. And we know this. And the risk is probably increasing every year, so —
But what can we do to reduce the risk of this impacting our system, our core claims and, unfortunately, the liabilities that come with such events? We can change and manage this…
Then we take this even further. And this is something Warren and I have discussed many times; utilities began to notice these unusual weather events were occurring. Warren touched on what happened with the storms in Nebraska.
But they also occur in the West in the same way or significant events occur.
But once we had those, we became very, very adept at saying, “Okay, we have to run the system differently.” Since an incident is likely to happen, we will potentially be de-energized.
But the one thing we didn’t address – and this is very relevant to the major event we had at PacifiCorp in 2020 – was that we didn’t de-energize the system as the fire approached, because our employees and the entire management team had been trained their whole lives to keep the lights on.
And the last thing they want to do is turn off those lights and de-energize the system.
After these events, when we really looked at how we were going to go about managing the assets and mitigating that risk, it became clear to us as a team that we needed to de-energize those assets.
BERKSHire SHARE TIME
BRK.A stock price: $746,500.00
BRK.B share price: $498.20
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 15.93
Berkshire market cap: $1,074,365,958,250
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding railroad cash and treasury bills payable: $354.3 billion (up 4.3% from June 30)
There have been no Berkshire stock buybacks since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication unless otherwise stated)
BERKSHire’S LARGEST SHAREHOLDING HOLDINGS – February 20, 2026
Berkshire’s top listed publicly traded stocks in the U.S. and Japan by market capitalization based on their latest closing prices.
Holdings as of December 31, 2025, as reported. Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing On February 17, 2026, except:
A complete list of holdings and current market values is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send me any questions or comments about the newsletter at: alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (We’re sorry, but we do not forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
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Additionally, reading Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders is highly recommended. There are people gathered on Berkshire’s website here.
— Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
