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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has built a $4.3bn stake in Alphabet, in what could be one of the conglomerate’s final new stock positions under the legendary investor as he nears retirement at the end of this year.
The new stake in Google’s parent company is Berkshire’s tenth-largest stock holding and somewhat of a deviation from Buffett’s philosophy of opting for long-term, buy-and-hold value stocks over high-growth companies.
Meanwhile, Buffett sold about $11bn worth of Apple shares in the third quarter, as he continued to trim his investment in one of his most profitable trades for the second consecutive quarter.
Berkshire disclosed it sold about 42mn Apple shares between June and September, leaving it with a position that was worth roughly $61bn at the end of the third quarter. However, the iPhone maker remains Berkshire’s biggest stock position.
Buffett sold more than two-thirds of his stake in Apple during a period from 2023 to 2024, which allowed the so-called Oracle of Omaha to lock in huge profits from the investment he first made in 2016.
In a letter to investors on Monday, Buffett said he was “going quiet”, retiring from his role as chief executive and stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities at the end of this year at the investing conglomerate he built.
Other than Apple and now Alphabet, Berkshire’s top stock holdings do not include investments in Big Tech companies. Its other largest positions, which remained largely unchanged for the third quarter, include American Express, Bank of America and Coca-Cola.
Despite Berkshire’s new position in Alphabet, the conglomerate continued to be a net seller of stocks during the period for the third consecutive year, offloading more than $6bn of equity investments in the third quarter. Over the past three years, Berkshire has sold about $184bn of stock.
Buffett’s vote of confidence in Alphabet underscores the turnaround in Google’s fortunes in its battle for dominance of the artificial intelligence market over the past year, while Apple is increasingly seen as falling behind Silicon Valley rivals in the AI race.
Google was caught flat-footed by the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022, and its first efforts to launch a rival chatbot misfired, driving fears that its core search advertising business would suffer as users switched to AI assistants to find online answers.
But this year has seen rapid improvements in Google’s AI capabilities. At the same time, its core search business has proved more resilient than some on Wall Street expected, with Alphabet’s total revenues hitting a record $100bn in the most recent quarter.
At Friday’s close, Apple’s stock had risen by about 12 per cent this year, while Alphabet is up 45 per cent, outrunning even AI chipmaker Nvidia to be the best-performing Big Tech stock so far in 2025.