The move investors had been waiting for has arrived. Berkshire Hathaway, founded by Warren Buffett and now run by chief executive Greg Abel, has started spending the mountain of cash it spent more than three years building, which peaked at a record 397,4 billion dollars at the end of the first quarter of this year.
That matters beyond Berkshire's own share price. The stubbornness with which the group held its cash had been read as a judgment that nothing on the market was worth buying, an awkward signal against a backdrop of steady buying on Wall Street outside a few downward stretches. In the second quarter Berkshire became a net buyer of shares for the first time in fifteen quarters, with purchases exceeding sales by almost 20 billion dollars.
The first thing it bought was itself. Buybacks came to about 4,5 billion dollars, against just 235 million in the first quarter. In detail, Berkshire repurchased 478 Class A shares for 349,6 million dollars and 8,6 million Class B shares for 4,18 billion. Macrae Sykes, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds, read two signals in that: management's conviction that the shares are undervalued, and the fact that it has identified opportunities to put money to work in this market. Taken together with the other shares bought and sold in the period, the cash position fell from the first quarter record to 365,5 billion dollars at the end of June.
Alongside the buybacks sits the big bet announced in June, a 10 billion dollar investment in Alphabet, the holding company behind Google. It arrives in the same year as the acquisition of Taylor Morrison for 6,8 billion, the first large deal Abel has done as chief executive.
The results themselves get read twice over, once for the profitability of the group and once as a reading on the market, a habit built over the 60 years Buffett ran it from 1965 to 31 December 2025. This time the message was that Berkshire chose buying over selling. Second quarter operating profit rose 16 percent to 12,98 billion dollars. Class B shares gained 1,46 percent to 529,42 dollars, their highest level since Buffett announced in May 2025 that he would step down, which he did at the end of December.
The year has not been spectacular even so. Berkshire is up a little over 5 percent since January against 13 percent for the S and P 500, which is part of why some analysts now expect the results to mark a turn. Brian Meredith of Ubs told Cnbc he continues to see Berkshire as an attractive defensive holding, given the strength of the balance sheet and the potential for earnings upside from operational improvements and from deploying excess cash into accretive acquisitions or buybacks. TD Cowen made the simpler point that the company has finally spent its money.
Michael Burry takes the opposite view. The investor who became known as Mr Big Short for betting against American housing before the 2008 crisis wrote on X that his greatest concern about Berkshire was that when Buffett stepped aside his successor would be too old and, without Buffett there, would lack the patience to wait for the right moment to invest. Abel is 64. Burry believes that fear has now materialised, and does not regard Berkshire as an attractive investment from here.