The Buffett era is over: Berkshire Hathaway is finally opening the vault

Berkshire Hathaway's massive cash pile is starting to shrink, and Wall Street sees this as the first sign of change in the post-Warren Buffett era. The company ended the second quarter with $364.7 billion in cash and short-term government bonds, a 4% decrease compared to the previous quarter — the first decline in its cash reserves quarter-over-quarter in four years. The reason is not weakness in operations, but rather the opening of the wallet: during the quarter, Berkshire purchased stocks and securities for $23.5 billion, compared to sales of only $3.7 billion, thus becoming a net buyer in the stock market for the first time in more than three years. The most prominent move was an investment of about $10 billion in Alphabet, Google's parent company, alongside the acquisition of homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion — one of the largest deals Berkshire has made in recent years.

Berkshire also began directing money toward repurchasing its own shares. In May and June, the company purchased 478 Class A shares and more than 8 million Class B shares, for a total of about $4.5 billion. This is an interesting shift for a company that for years preferred to accumulate cash and wait for opportunities, while Buffett avoided large deals during periods when he assessed that market prices were too high. Now, after Abel replaced Buffett as CEO in January, it seems the money is starting to work. However, it is still too early to talk about a revolution: even after all the investments, Berkshire is still sitting on more than $360 billion in liquid assets. One of Abel's main tasks will be to find uses for this unusual amount of money without compromising the financial discipline through which Buffett built the empire.

And Berkshire's strong quarter provides Abel with room to maneuver. The company's net profit more than doubled to $25.67 billion, compared to $12.37 billion in the same period last year, and the profit per Class A share reached $17,868, compared to $8,601 a year earlier. Operating profit, the metric that Berkshire and Buffett tend to focus on more, also rose by 16.3% to $12.98 billion. The manufacturing, service, and retail operations, which include, among others, Duracell and the Flying J gas station chain, showed a 24% jump in profit to $4.47 billion. On the other hand, the insurance business recorded a decline in underwriting profits, partly due to the results of the car insurance company Geico and also a decline in investment income. Net profit is also affected by fluctuations in Berkshire's huge investment portfolio, so the company prefers to examine performance through operating profit.

Abel's big challenge, however, is not just to spend the money – but to know when and where to do it. "It's very hard to want Greg to execute large deals in a bull and enthusiastic market like now," said Paul Lountzis, president of Lountzis Asset Management, which holds Berkshire shares. "The private markets are crazy, and the public markets are also quite ridiculous." These words illustrate the dilemma: on one hand, investors expect the huge treasury to be utilized; on the other hand, investing hundreds of billions just to get rid of the cash could hurt future returns. Berkshire's main holdings currently include Alphabet, American Express, Apple, Bank of America, and Coca-Cola, and next week the company is expected to publish a regulatory filing that will reveal more details about the changes it made to its stock portfolio.

Berkshire's Class A stock closed on Friday at a price of $780,086, and it is up 3.4% since the beginning of the year, but still 3.6% lower than the peak of $809,350 recorded in May 2025, shortly before Buffett announced his retirement. For investors, the most important figure in the reports is not necessarily the quarterly profit, but the fact that the company is starting to change the way it allocates its capital. For more than half a century, Buffett was the man who decided when Berkshire buys, when it sells, and when it simply sits on cash and waits. Now Abel is taking over one of the largest cash piles in the business world, and his first steps are already starting to show. Berkshire is still far from spending the mountain of cash that Buffett built, but the vault is open – and the big question on Wall Street is how far Abel will go.