Berkshire pads Delta, Alphabet stakes as Abel taps cash pile

Berkshire Hathaway spent the second quarter leaning harder into stocks, and Greg Abel’s first stretch as chief executive is starting to look less like a handoff and more like a reset. The company added 17.5 million Delta Air Lines shares, lifting that holding to $5.37 billion at the end of June, and bought 48.1 million more Alphabet shares, making Google’s parent Berkshire’s third-biggest holding at $37.8 billion.

That wasn’t just paper buying. Berkshire also spent about $4.5 billion buying back its own stock in the period, while adding a net of almost $20 billion of other equities, according to the company’s second-quarter results. The cash pile is still enormous, just a little less enormous than before: $365.5 billion at midyear, down from a record $397 billion at the end of March.

And Abel did something Buffett had often resisted: he moved on a few multibillion-dollar deals. Berkshire spent $6.8 billion on homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home Corp., a classic value-style bet, and separately handed $10 billion to Alphabet to support its artificial intelligence investments. The Taylor Morrison deal closed last month.

Berkshire also kept leaning into housing with more Lennar shares, taking that stake to about $1.21 billion. At the same time, it continued trimming Bank of America and now owns 6.8% of the lender’s shares. Elsewhere, the Gates Foundation sold almost 2.4 million Berkshire Class B shares, leaving its stake at $7.35 billion at quarter-end.