(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter with news and analysis about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. You can sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday evening.)
Berkshire was a net seller of stocks in Buffett’s final quarter as CEO
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Berkshire has sold Apple shares in each of the last three quarters and in seven of the last nine three-month periods, reducing its holdings by just over 75% since the summer of 2023.
Still, Apple remains Berkshire’s largest stock holding, valued at $60.3 billion as of Friday.
However, Apple sales helped, #2 American Express close the gap from almost $150 billion to just under $8 billion.
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It’s been six quarters of revenue in a row for Bank of America, meaning this holding’s shares have declined 75% since mid-2024.
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Berkshire’s stake in Amazon.com was worth $2.2 billion at the end of the third quarter. After selling 7.7 million shares in the fourth quarter, it is now down to $478 million, a decline of 77%.
In 2019, when Amazon first showed up with an $860 million position in Berkshire’s portfolio, Buffett went out of his way to tell CNBC’s Becky Quick that it wasn’t his decision, that he didn’t think it was a significant holding, and that no major “personality change” had reversed his traditional aversion to tech stocks.
Barron’s believes it was portfolio manager Todd Combs who bought the shares and that the big drop may be related to his departure from the company in December JPMorgan Chase.
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Investors were not deterred by Berkshire’s sales of the three stocks. They all finished the week higher.
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Oil purchase and insurance
Berkshire increased its stake in Chevron by 6.6% in the fourth quarter, adding another $1.2 billion to the position based on the oil giant’s year-end share price.
That’s the biggest gain of any Berkshire stock in the fourth quarter, but there haven’t been any particularly significant changes to Chevron’s position over the last three years.
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Higher crude oil prices have helped lift Chevron’s share price 20.7% year-to-date, putting the current value of the stake at nearly $24 billion, up from $19.8 billion on Dec. 31.
It ranks fifth among Berkshire’s stock holdings by value.
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Chubb was the second-largest buy of the quarter, with shares rising 9.3%, adding 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 currently worth nearly $11.4 billion, making it the eighth-largest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio.
Berkshire is taking a small step back into the 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.
It is currently valued at $395 million, up from $352 million at the end of the year, thanks to a 12.4% increase in the newspaper’s share price.
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. As a child, he delivered the Washington Post and other newspapers in D.C., bought a very profitable Post holding for Berkshire in the 1970s, maintained a close friendship with Post publisher Katherine Graham, and worked closely with the editor of a small Omaha weekly in Berkshire that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
But in 2020, Berkshire sold its newspaper holdings, including Buffett’s hometown newspaper The Omaha World-Herald and The Buffalo News, owned by Berkshire since 1977, to Lee Enterprises for $140 million.
Based on the relatively small size of the Times stake – it represents 0.1% of the value of Berkshire’s stock portfolio – it was almost certainly not a Buffett purchase, as either portfolio manager Ted Weschler or Todd Combs (before his departure) made the purchase decision.
While buying the Times is almost chump change by Berkshire standards, it is more than the $250 million Jeff Bezos paid for The Washington Post in 2013, a price that was estimated at the time to be four times what the paper was worth.
The Times Company’s current market value is $12.6 billion, giving Berkshire a 3.1% share.
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Berkshire’s vote of confidence appeared to add to the Times’ momentum, as shares ended the week up 6.9% and at an all-time high of about $78.
A complete list of Berkshire’s U.S. holdings as of December 31 can be found below.
Energy supplier Berkshire settles federal wildfire claims
Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp took two key steps this week to deal with the huge liability claims it faces from wildfires in the West.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced that the utility had agreed to pay $575 million to resolve U.S. government damages claims stemming from six fires in California and Oregon in 2020 and 2022.
The government says PacifiCorp’s power lines “negligently” started all six fires. The press release states: “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 is quoted as saying that the agreement “balances the burden by addressing the government’s significant costs of firefighting and loss of natural resources without preventing PacifiCorp from providing fair-priced electricity.”
A statement from PacifiCorp said the company has now settled “nearly 90% of known claims” totaling more than $2.2 billion, “providing peace of mind for customers and making progress toward becoming a financially healthy utility.”
A MODIS satellite image from NASA shows wildfires in Oregon, U.S., September 8, 2020. Image taken September 8, 2020.
Maxar Technologies | via Reuters
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BUFFETT & BERKSHIRE ON THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM CNBC’S BUFFETT ARCHIVE
How Berkshire’s utilities are responding to wildfire threats now (2025)
Greg Abel describes how Berkshire utilities are working to reduce the risk that their equipment could contribute to wildfires.
BECKY QUICK (submits a shareholder question): “Please discuss your strategy for protecting our company from future liabilities due to wildfires attributed to our utilities in the West.”
WARREN BUFFETT: Well, that’s a very good question. And – and we have – we made some mistakes in the past when we bought PacifiCorp in 2000, what, five?
GREG ABEL: Yes.
WARREN BUFFETT: Walter Scott, David Sokol and I, three people who – capitalists at heart – and we handle our own money.
But we made a mistake when we didn’t divide it into seven states that we bought. And it came – it came with aggregation where it wasn’t state by state. And we – we kept the same structure. And that was a – that was a big mistake.
There’s – well, every part of the country is going to need electricity. And there will be places where it would be very foolish to run private electric utilities – where there would be public electricity.
And we will find out how this is solved in a democracy.
But those are the facts as they stand now, I would say.
Greg?
GREG ABEL: Yes. The reality, the risk around the wildfires, meaning that the wildfires occur, they’re not going to go away. And we know that. And the risk probably increases every year, so –
But what we can do to reduce the risk of it impacting our system and our underlying claims, and unfortunately the liabilities that come with such events, is something we can change and manage…
Then let’s go one step further. And this is something Warren and I have talked about many times: utilities have started to recognize when these unusual weather events are happening. And Warren addressed what happened in Nebraska with the storms.
But they are equally happening – or significant events – in the West.
But once we have those, we can very, very well say: Okay, we need to manage the system differently. We may turn off the power as an event is likely to occur.
But the one thing we hadn’t addressed – and this is very relevant to the one significant event we had at PacifiCorp in 2020 – is that we didn’t turn off the system as the fire approached because our employees and the entire management team have been trained to keep the lights on their entire lives.
And the last thing they want to do is turn off the lights and knock out power to a system.
And after these events, as we thought hard about how we move forward in managing the assets and reducing that risk, we realized as a team that we needed to shut down those assets.
BERKSHIRE STOCK CLOCK
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BRK.A share 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 Rail Cash and deducting T-Bills payable: $354.3 billion (up 4.3% from June 30)
No Berkshire share buybacks since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication unless otherwise stated)
BERKSHIRE’S TOP STOCK HOLDINGS – February 20, 2026
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Berkshire’s largest holdings of disclosed publicly traded stocks in the US and Japan, by market value based on recent closing prices.
Holdings are as of December 31, 2025, as reflected in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing dated February 17, 2026, except for:
For the full list of holdings and current market values, visit CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send me questions or comments about the newsletter to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (We’re sorry, but we don’t forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
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Buffett’s annual letters to shareholders are also highly recommended reading. They are collected here on Berkshire’s website.
– Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch