Greg Abel finally found Berkshire’s buy button… please cancel the recession until further notice. 

In his second quarter running Berkshire Hathaway, Abel cracked open the company’s $397.4 billion piggy bank and started spending like he had recently discovered that cash does not, in fact, compound at 20% forever.

Berkshire finished June with $365.5 billion in cash and Treasury bills, down nearly $32 billion from the record pile it had accumulated three months earlier.

Don’t worry, nobody in Omaha is applying for food stamps. Berkshire still has enough cash to purchase every NFL franchise and presumably make the New York Jets competitive (source: trust me bro).

But this was the first significant decline in the company’s cash reserves since early 2022. More importantly, Berkshire bought $20 billion more in stocks than it sold during the quarter, snapping a 14-quarter streak as a net seller of equities.

For anyone keeping score at home, that is more than three years of Warren Buffett and company staring at Wall Street’s menu, complaining about the prices, and ordering another round of Treasury bills.

Well, Abel clearly got hungry.

Some of that money went toward Berkshire itself. The company repurchased $4.5 billion of its own shares during the quarter, up from just $235 million during the first three months of the year.

Analysts had expected even more, but criticizing a $4.5 billion buyback from a company you’ve spent years begging to deploy its cash feels a little ungrateful.

And Abel may not have stopped there. Based on Berkshire’s shrinking share count, some reports estimate he added another $3.4 billion of stock into the cart during July before the price started running away from him.

That would bring the possible total to nearly $8 billion in four months and offer a fairly obvious clue about what Abel thinks Berkshire is worth.

It also lets Abel plant his flag without spending $40 billion on a railroad or arm-wrestling Warren Buffett for control of the checkbook.

In addition to eating its own cooking… the company’s $20 billion of net equity purchases included its previously announced $10 billion investment in Alphabet, which has quickly become one of Berkshire’s biggest holdings.

Buffett reportedly planted the seed before stepping down, but Abel has been watering it with a fire hose. Berkshire’s Alphabet stake exploded from 17.8 million shares at the end of 2025 to nearly 58 million during the first quarter. 

Which is a mildly hilarious conclusion to Buffett spending decades warning investors about businesses he couldn’t understand, only for Berkshire’s next era to begin with an astronomical bet on artificial intelligence.

Apple, meanwhile, has gone from Berkshire’s ride-or-die to someone Buffett occasionally likes on Instagram. Its share of the portfolio has fallen from more than 50% to only 20%, while Bank of America has been cut nearly in half since mid-2024.

Fortunately, the businesses beneath Berkshire’s portfolio are still putting numbers on the board. 

Operating earnings increased 16% to $12.98 billion during the quarter. Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s earnings climbed 27%, BNSF railroad profits rose 6%, and earnings from the company’s manufacturing, service, and retail operations jumped 24% to nearly $4.5 billion.

Unfortunately, insurance (the foundation Warren built Berkshire on) was the turd floating in an otherwise respectable earnings report. Underwriting earnings fell 13%, investment income dropped 9%, and GEICO’s underwriting profit skidded 45%. 

But one totaled quarter at GEICO couldn’t hide the larger message.

Greg Abel inherited the largest cash pile in history and spent months being asked whether Warren Buffett had forgotten to leave him the pin.

Well guess what? He found it… and obviously decided Google’s robot army was as good a place as any to start.

The real criticism begins now that he’s finally taking some risks.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Alphabet and Apple as mentioned in the article.