Berkshire Hathaway's $1.1T Capital Machine Rallies

Berkshire Hathaway shares climbed Friday to their highest closing level since Warren Buffett told shareholders at the May 2025 annual meeting he planned to step down as CEO at year’s end. The company’s market capitalization stood at $1,138,885,966,355. Capital moves; ordinary people don’t get a say in who controls it.

Who Holds the Capital

Class A shares closed at $798,000, 1.4% below their all-time closing high of $809,350. Class B shares ended at $532.02, also 1.4% below their all-time closing high of $539.80. A Thursday loss snapped a 10-session winning streak, during which Berkshire’s share prices had climbed 5%; the shares rebounded more than 1% Friday.

The latest rally follows a sharp retreat after Buffett’s announcement. Class A and Class B shares closed at all-time highs the day before he disclosed his plan. Over the next three months, they fell more than 14% as investors worried that the “Buffett premium” was dissolving. Berkshire hit its post-meeting low in August 2025, and its recovery since then hasn’t followed a straight line.

Berkshire’s Class B shares have cut almost two-thirds of their 17.5-percentage-point deficit to the S&P 500 on June 1. They’re now 6.0 percentage points behind the benchmark for the year. The Class B price-to-earnings ratio, based on trailing 12 months, was 13.38.

Investors may welcome Berkshire putting some of its immense cash reserve to work under CEO Greg Abel. The company repurchased $4.5 billion of its shares in the second quarter of 2026 and invested in Alphabet, Taylor Morrison Home, Lennar and Bending Spoons. Berkshire still held roughly $360 billion in cash, which was described as “a good symbol of continued patience under the new CEO.”

The Cash Pile and Its Winners

Berkshire reported $365.5 billion in cash as of June 30, down 8.0% from March 31. Excluding Rail Cash and subtracting T-Bills Payable, the figure was $359.2 billion, down 3.8% from March 31. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Meyer Shields said higher short-term interest rates could lift the shares because Berkshire would be “making more money” on its cash.

A quiet hurricane season so far has benefited Berkshire’s insurance operations. Higher oil prices helped its $19 billion stake in Chevron, whose shares closed Friday at an all-time high after gaining almost 36% since the start of July. Berkshire’s energy-related subsidiaries also got a tailwind. Investors moving away from high-flying AI and technology stocks toward “old” economy companies may be helping the company, too.

Coca-Cola, a long-time Buffett favorite and a $37.6 billion Berkshire holding, also closed Friday at an all-time high. KFC’s switch from Pepsi to Coke may have helped. Coca-Cola was up 34% year-to-date, and Berkshire’s position gained $2.4 billion since the previous Friday, overtaking Alphabet as the third-largest stake in its portfolio.

A New Bet, With No Public Face

Berkshire’s investment in Bending Spoons, an Italian company that began trading on Nasdaq in the United States in July, was close to $1 billion and had gained substantially in the short term. The company buys internet businesses including AOL, Evernote and Vimeo, uses artificial intelligence to cut costs, then uses the savings to make acquisitions. It isn’t a typical Berkshire value investment and trades at a large multiple of its earnings.

Before the U.S. market opened Wednesday, Bending Spoons announced that Berkshire would invest a “further” $330 million, buying 10 million newly issued shares at $33 each in a private placement. That price was almost 12% below Tuesday’s $37.86 close. Bending Spoons shares reached an intraday high of $58.56 and closed Wednesday up 41% at $53.46. After giving back some gains in Friday’s technology-stock sell-off, they ended at $47.07, up 24.3% over the three trading days since the announcement and 42.6% above Berkshire’s purchase price. That’s a paper profit of nearly $141 million on the new shares.

The announcement also disclosed that Berkshire had invested $600 million in Bending Spoons’ initial public offering more than three months earlier. The release didn’t say how many shares Berkshire bought in July, and the company didn’t confirm the calculation. Assuming Berkshire paid the $29 IPO price, its initial purchase would have been almost 20.7 million shares. Combined with the new purchase, its holding would be close to 30.7 million shares, worth more than $1.4 billion at Friday’s close, a 55.3% gain on its total $930 million investment.

Nobody knew who at Berkshire decided to invest. Bending Spoons said the “new investment brings Berkshire Hathaway’s ownership to 4%.” Its email said it hadn’t “specifically disclosed” its current number of outstanding shares. CEO and Co-Founder Luca Ferrari praised Berkshire as “among the finest and most respected capital allocators in the world,” and called it a “longstanding inspiration for Bending Spoons.” The report names investors, analysts and executives; it describes no grassroots response or mutual-aid effort.