(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.)
Just a week after Berkshire Hathaway revealed last Friday that it had purchased 17.8 million Class A shares of Google's parent company, alphabetIn the third quarter (July-September), the market value of this position increased by $415 million to almost $5.35 billion.
GOOGL rose 8.4% this week, while its biggest tech rivals fell significantly Nvidia's Strong returns failed to overcome fears of an “AI bubble.”
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Alphabet shares started the week up 3.1% on Monday, apparently in response to news of the Berkshire purchase.
The release of Google's new AI model Gemini 3 on Wednesday, which is receiving positive reviews, gave the stock a further boost.
(Apparently, Google's AI dynamics are starting to worry OpenAI's Sam Altman.)
While a full assessment of the move obviously won't come for months or years, someone in Omaha is probably smiling right now.
Warren Buffett, as usual, is credited in many headlines, and many publications assume he is responsible for everything Berkshire does.
However, we know this is not the case as portfolio managers Ted Weschler and Todd Combs can act as free agents.
As I noted last week, Alphabet doesn't feel like Buffett's “one kind of stock.”
CNBC.com's Yun Li writes that the investment was “likely” the work of Weschler or Coombs, noting that they were behind many of Berkshire's “technology-focused” investments, including in Berkshire Amazon stake, now worth $2.2 billion.
(Even before this position was first announced in 2019, Buffett went out of his way to tell CNBC's Becky Quick that it was not his decision and “no personality change has occurred.”)
Warren Buffett and Greg Abel lead the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting on May 3, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska.
David A. Grogen | CNBC
Bloomberg Opinion columnist Nir Kaissar recalls Buffett's famous refusal to invest in a company he doesn't fully understand, which kept him out of the Internet bubble in the late 1990s, and calls AI “orders of magnitude more complicated than selling books or pet food online.”
He adds: “Combine opaque technology with top-notch valuations and you're bound to lose Buffett.”
Kaissar says he feels that CEO-designate Greg Abel has just shown us a “very different approach than Berkshire shareholders are used to – specifically, a new willingness to pay more now for potentially higher growth later, an opportunity that Buffett rarely, if ever, takes advantage of.”
Berkshire did not respond to my midday email seeking clarification about who decided to buy Alphabet. The company almost never reveals who bought what.
BUFFET ON THE INTERNET
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ARCHIVE
Buffett on what it means to “understand” a company (2000)
Warren Buffett explains that when he says he doesn't understand tech stocks, what he means is that he doesn't understand where the tech industry will be in 10 years.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: As for these tech stocks, you say you don't understand them… I can't imagine there's anything you don't understand.
WARREN BUFFETT: Oh, we understand the product. We understand what it means to people. We simply don't know what the economy will look like in 10 years.
I mean, you can understand all types – you can understand steel. You can understand house construction. But when you look at a home builder and think about where they will be in five or 10 years, the economics are a different question.
I mean, it's not about understanding the product that they're making or the means by which they're distributing it and all of those things. It's about the predictability of the economic situation in ten years. And that is our problem.
BERKSHIRE STOCK CLOCK
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BRK.A share price: $755,320.00
BRK.B share price: $504.04
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 16.12
Berkshire market cap: $1,085,818,736,612
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 – November 21, 2025
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Berkshire's largest holding of publicly traded stocks in the US and Japan, by market value, based on today's closing prices.
Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reflected in Berkshire Hathaway's 13F filing dated November 14, 2025, 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