The real catalyst here is not that Berkshire bought or sold a few famous stocks. It’s that the first visible portfolio moves around Greg Abel’s rise tell us what kind of CEO he is likely to be: less mythic, more managerial, and probably more ruthless about focus.
The succession itself is no longer a thought experiment. Berkshire said on May 5, 2025 that its board unanimously approved Greg Abel to become president and CEO effective January 1, 2026. By Berkshire’s 2025 annual report filed February 28, 2026, Abel was signing as president and chief executive officer. That matters because Berkshire’s late-2025 and early-2026 13Fs now read less like Buffett epilogues and more like an operating memo from the new boss.
Start with AMZN, because this is where the change is loudest. Berkshire’s March 31, 2025 13F still showed a Berkshire position in Amazon of about 10 million shares. By the time Berkshire filed its quarter-end 2025 portfolio, outside analyses built from the SEC filing showed Berkshire had cut the position by roughly 77% in Q4 2025. Then, in Berkshire’s first 13F under Abel, Reuters reported the company sold many of its smaller holdings including Amazon. Translation: this was not a trim. It was a dismissal.
Why dump AMZN while investors are still chanting “AI” like it’s a sacrament? The restrained answer is valuation discipline and fit. Amazon is a terrific business, but Berkshire has often preferred businesses whose economics are easier to underwrite with fewer moving parts. AWS is excellent; retail is sprawling; capex is heavy; and the market has been perfectly happy to capitalize the whole machine at roughly $2.9 trillion, with the stock recently around $266. Great company, maybe. Obvious Berkshire-style bargain, not so much.
Now AAPL. Investors keep trying to turn every Apple sale into a divorce filing. It isn’t. Berkshire’s own SEC disclosures still show Apple as an enormous holding: the March 31, 2025 information table sums to about 300 million Apple shares, and portfolio trackers based on the later SEC filings still list Apple as Berkshire’s largest disclosed equity investment in Q1 2026 at about $57.8 billion, or roughly 22% of the 13F portfolio. That is not what abandonment looks like. That is what disciplined de-concentration looks like.
The late-2025 Apple trimming also fits a boring explanation, which is usually the right one: when one position gets too large, eventually you shave it. Outside analysis of Berkshire’s Q4 2025 filing pegged the Apple reduction at roughly 4.3%, or 10.3 million shares. Berkshire can both admire Apple’s economics and decide that letting one stock dominate the public-equity book forever is a little too cute.
The more interesting tell is GOOGL. In Q1 2026, Reuters reported Berkshire more than tripled its stake in Alphabet to about $16.6 billion. A portfolio tracker built from the filing shows Berkshire held about 54.3 million Alphabet shares worth roughly $15.6 billion, or 5.9% of the portfolio, at March 31, 2026. That is big enough to be a view, not a doodle.
And it’s a very Berkshire-ish view. Alphabet throws off huge cash flow, owns durable distribution through Search and YouTube, has a serious cloud business, and still has a balance sheet strong enough to survive management’s occasional need to audition for science fiction. If Abel wanted a large-cap tech exposure that looked cheaper and less concentration-prone than AAPL, GOOGL is a sensible place to lean.
What ties the AMZN exit, the AAPL trimming, and the GOOGL addition together is not some grand style revolution. It’s portfolio hygiene. Reuters said before Berkshire’s May 2026 annual meeting that Abel was already overseeing about 94% of Berkshire’s stock investments by February 2026. Meanwhile Berkshire’s balance sheet ended 2025 with $47.7 billion of cash and cash equivalents and $321.4 billion of short-term Treasury bills. When a CEO inherits that much liquidity, he does not need to force brilliance. He needs to avoid stupidity. There are worse job descriptions.
That also helps explain why Abel’s first visible “buyback” instinct was not heroic common-stock shopping but Berkshire buying a bit of itself. Reuters reported in March 2026 that Berkshire had resumed share repurchases after a nearly two-year hiatus, and another Reuters report said the company had recently spent more than $200 million repurchasing shares. That is not dramatic. It is, however, very on-brand for a CEO who seems content to wait for a fat pitch instead of swinging at the rosin bag.
So what should investors take from the re-balance? Mainly this: Abel does not appear eager to cosplay Buffett. Good. Berkshire doesn’t need an impressionist; it needs a steward. Selling down AMZN, clipping AAPL, and building GOOGL suggest a manager willing to simplify, re-rank quality, and preserve flexibility without pretending the market is full of bargains just because cash makes people itchy.
What to watch: if Berkshire keeps pruning smaller holdings while adding only to a few very large positions like GOOGL, will Abel turn Berkshire’s equity portfolio into an even narrower list of high-conviction giants—or does this cash mountain eventually force a truly elephant-sized acquisition?