(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday night.)
Berkshire was a net seller of its stock in Buffett’s last quarter as CEO.
Berkshire has sold Apple stock in each of the past three quarters and seven of the past nine three-month periods, reducing its stock holdings by more than 75% since summer 2023.
Still, Apple remains Berkshire’s biggest stock, worth $60.3 billion at Friday’s closing price.
However, Apple’s sales contributed to the second place american express The gap narrows from about $150 billion to just under $8 billion.
It would be Bank of America’s sixth straight quarter of sales, and its stake in the stock would decline by 75% starting in mid-2024.
Berkshire’s Amazon.com stake was valued at $2.2 billion at the end of the third quarter. After selling 7.7 million shares in the fourth quarter, it’s now down to $478 million, a 77% decline.
When Amazon first added an $860 million position to Berkshire’s portfolio in 2019, Buffett went out of his way to tell CNBC’s Becky Quick that it wasn’t his decision, that he didn’t consider it a significant holding, and that a major “personality change” had not reversed his traditional aversion to tech stocks.
Barron’s suggests that the stake was purchased by portfolio manager Todd Combs, and that the large reduction may be related to his leaving the company in December to join the company. JP Morgan Chase.
Investors weren’t daunted by Berkshire’s sale of three stocks. Both ended this week higher.
Purchasing oil and insurance
Berkshire increased its stake in Chevron by 6.6% during the fourth quarter, adding an additional $1.2 billion to its position based on the oil giant’s year-end stock price.
This is the biggest gain for Berkshire stock in the fourth quarter, but Chevron’s position hasn’t changed much over the past three years.
Rising oil prices have pushed Chevron’s stock price up 20.7% since the beginning of the year, and the stock is now worth about $24 billion, up from $19.8 billion as of Dec. 31.
It ranks fifth among Berkshire’s holdings by value.
Chubb was the second-biggest buy of the quarter, with a 9.3% increase in shares, adding about $910 million to the value of the position based on the insurer’s Dec. 31 stock price.
Berkshire’s 34.2 million shares are currently valued at about $11.4 billion, making it the eighth-largest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio.
Berkshire gradually returns to 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.
The newspaper company’s stock price rose 12.4%, giving it a current valuation of $395 million, up from $352 million at year-end.
The New York Times building in Manhattan, New York, August 3, 2020.
Shannon Stapleton Reuter
Buffett’s love of newspapers goes back a long way. He delivered the Washington Post and other D.C. newspapers as a child, bought Berkshire’s highly profitable Post stock in the 1970s, befriended Post publisher Katharine Graham, and worked closely with the editor of Omaha, a small Berkshire-owned weekly that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.
But in 2020, Berkshire sold its holdings in newspapers, including Buffett’s hometown daily, the Omaha World-Herald, and the Buffalo News, a Berkshire property since 1977, to Lee Enterprises for $140 million.
Based on the relatively small size of the Times stock (it accounts for 0.1% of the value of Berkshire’s stock portfolio), it was almost certainly not a purchase by Buffett, as either portfolio manager Ted Weschler or (before he left) Todd Combs made the purchase decision.
The Times deal is little change by Berkshire’s standards, but it’s more expensive than the $250 million Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post in 2013, a price thought at the time to be four times the paper’s value.
Berkshire will own a 3.1% stake in the Times Company, which currently has a market value of $12.6 billion.
Berkshire’s vote of confidence seemed to give the Times even more momentum, as the stock rose 6.9% to end the week at an all-time high, closing at around $78.
Below is a complete list of Berkshire’s U.S. holdings as of Dec. 31.
Berkshire Power Company Settles Federal Wildfire Lawsuit
Berkshire Hathaway’s PacifiCorp took two important steps this week to address the huge claims it faces from wildfires in the West.
On Friday, the Justice Department announced that the utility has agreed to pay $575 million to settle damages claims filed by the U.S. government over six fires in California and Oregon in 2020 and 2022.
The government claims PacifiCorp’s power lines “inadvertently” caused all six fires. “The claims resolved by this settlement are mere allegations and no determination of liability has been made. PacifiCorp continues to deny liability for these fires,” the company’s news release said.
A Justice Department official reportedly said the agreement “balances the government’s significant firefighting costs and natural resource losses without preventing PacifiCorp from providing electricity at a fair price.”
PacifiCorp’s statement said the company has now resolved “nearly 90% of known claims” for more than $2.2 billion, “bringing certainty to our customers and moving us toward a financially healthy utility.”
NASA MODIS satellite image shows wildfires in Oregon, USA, on September 8, 2020. Photo taken on September 8, 2020.
Maxar Technologies | via Reuters
Buffett and Berkshire on the Internet
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CNBC’s Buffett Archive Highlights
How Berkshire Utilities Are Responding to the Wildfire Threat Today (2025)
Greg Abel explains how Berkshire utilities are working to reduce the risk of their equipment contributing to wildfires.
Becky Quick (relaying shareholder question): “Please discuss your strategy on how to protect us from future liability from wildfires attributed to Western electric utilities.”
Warren Buffett: Well, that’s a very good question. And we made some mistakes in the past when we acquired PacifiCorp in 2000. What, five?
Greg Abel: Yes.
WARREN BUFFETT: Walter Scott, David Sokol, and I are all capitalists at heart, and we handle our own money.
However, I made a mistake by not dividing it into the seven states I was purchasing. And it involved aggregation, not state by state. And we kept the same structure. And that was a big mistake.
Well, every part of the country will need electricity. And there will be places where it would be extremely foolish for a public power company to run a private power company.
It remains to be seen how this will be resolved in a democracy.
But I would like to say that that is the reality as it stands.
Greg?
Greg Abel: Yeah. The reality is that the risks surrounding wildfires, that is, the risk of wildfires, even if they occur, do not disappear. And we know it. And the risk probably increases every year, so
But what we can do to reduce the risk of it impacting our systems, the underlying claims, and unfortunately the liability that comes with such an event is to change and manage it…
We will take this further. And this is something that Warren and I have discussed many times: Utilities are starting to realize that these extreme weather events are occurring. Warren also mentioned the storm brewing in Nebraska.
However, these things are happening in the West as well, or significant events are happening there as well.
But once we had them, we were able to say, “Okay, we need to manage the system differently.” An event may occur that may cause the power to be turned off.
But one thing we didn’t address, and this is very relevant to one important thing that happened at PacifiCorp in 2020, was not turning off the system when the fire was approaching. Because our employees and our entire management team have been trained to keep the lights on.
And the last thing they want to do is turn off the lights and turn off the system.
And in the wake of these events, as we seriously considered how to move forward with asset management and risk mitigation, we as a team clearly recognized the need to de-energize these assets.
berkshire stock watch
BRK.A stock price: $746,500.00
BRK.B stock price: $498.20
BRK.BP/E (TTM): 15.93
Berkshire Market Capitalization: $1,074,365,958,250
Berkshire Cash as of September 30: $381.7 billion (up 10.9% from June 30)
Excluding railroad cash and outstanding Treasury bills: $354.3 billion (4.3% increase from June 30)
There have been no repurchases of Berkshire stock since May 2024.
(All figures are as of the date of publication, unless otherwise noted)
Berkshire’s Top Stock Holdings – February 20, 2026
Berkshire’s top U.S. and Japanese listed stocks by market capitalization, based on the latest closing prices.
Holdings are as of December 31, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s February 17, 2026 13F filing. However, the following cases are excluded.
A complete list of holdings and current market value is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
Question or comment
If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter, please send them to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, we do not forward questions or comments to Mr. Buffett himself.)
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I also highly recommend Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. It’s collected here on Berkshire’s website.
— Alex Crippen, Warren Buffett Watch Editor
