Investing

Warren Buffett Technology Guru? See The 4 Tech Stocks Where He Owns Millions of Shares

Lee Jackson

Published: May 23, 2024 8:35 am

If any investor has stood the test of time, it’s Warren Buffett, and with good reason. For years, the “Oracle of Omaha” has had a rock star-like presence in the investing world, and his annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting draws thousands of loyal fans who are investors.

Long-time investors and Buffett mavens are familiar with his quote, “His favorite holding for an S&P 500 stock is forever,” so it’s not surprising to report that despite Berkshire Hathaway’s success and stature in the investment world, for years, technology stocks were avoided as Warren Buffett avoided companies he didn’t understand.

Our analysis of Warren Buffett’s portfolio has yielded some intriguing results. Despite some recent sales at Berkshire Hathaway, a technology giant now holds the largest position in the fund. Furthermore, we’ve uncovered three additional technology stocks that may surprise investors as part of the legendary investor’s holdings, providing a unique perspective on his evolving investment strategy.

Why are we covering this?

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We felt that most people would be intrigued by the technology positions in a portfolio many would feel is pretty “old school” given the conservative companies that Warren Buffett has made the staple of Berkshire Hathaway.

Amazon.com

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While a relatively small position, Berkshire Hathaway does own 10 million shares. Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN)
engages in retail selling consumer products, advertising, and subscription services through online and physical stores in North America and internationally.

The company operates through three segments:

• North America,
• International, and
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

It also manufactures and sells electronic devices, including:

• Kindle
• Fire tablets
• Fire TVs
• Echo
• Ring
• Blink
• Eero

The technology giant also develops and produces media content. In addition, the company offers programs that enable sellers to sell their products in its stores and programs that allow authors, independent publishers, musicians, filmmakers, Twitch streamers, skill and app developers, and others to publish and sell content.

Further, it provides computing, storage, database, analytics, machine learning, other services, and advertising services through programs, such as sponsored ads, display, and video advertising.

Additionally, the company offers Amazon Prime, a membership program. The company’s products offered through its stores include merchandise and content purchased for resale and products offered by third-party sellers. It serves consumers, sellers, developers, enterprises, content creators, advertisers, and employees.

Apple

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It’s almost hard to comprehend that the legacy technology giant still makes up almost 40% of the Berkshire Hataway portfolio with 789,600,000 shares and holds over 5% of Apple’s stock even after selling about 115 million shares in the first quarter. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) designs, manufactures, and markets smartphones, personal computers, tablets, wearables, and accessories worldwide.

The company offers:

• The iPhone, a line of smartphones
• Mac, a line of personal computers
• iPad, a line of multi-purpose tablets
• Wearables, home, and accessories comprising AirPods, Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats products, and HomePod

Apple also provides AppleCare support and cloud services and operates various platforms, including the App Store, allowing customers to discover and download applications and digital content, such as books, music, video, games, and podcasts.

In addition, the company offers various services, such as:

• Apple Arcade, a game subscription service
• Apple Fitness+, a personalized fitness service
• Apple Music, which gives users a curated listening experience with on-demand radio stations
• Apple News+, a subscription news and magazine service
• Apple TV+, which offers exclusive original content
• Apple Card, a co-branded credit card
• Apple Pay, a cashless payment service

Apple Investors are paid a modest 0.55% dividend and the stock generates $789,600,000 in passive dividend income every year. for Berkshire Hathaway. 

Snowflake

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While a very small position, Berkshire Hathaway does hold 6,125,376 shares of the company. Snowflake Inc. (NYSE: SNOW) provides a cloud-based data platform for various organizations in the United States and internationally.

Its platform offers Data Cloud, which enables customers to consolidate data into a single source of truth to drive meaningful business insights, build data-driven applications, share data and data products, and apply artificial intelligence (AI) to solve business problems.

In June, the company will host Data Cloud Summit 2024, which will bring together up to an estimated 15,000 attendees spanning Snowflake customers, partners, developers, technical experts, industry luminaries, and executives to deliver insights, cutting-edge use cases, and new ways to drive value with the Data Cloud.

VeriSign

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Trading just above a 52-week low, this could be a target for another purchase, but Berkshire Hathaway owns almost 13% of the company, with 12,815,613 shares. VeriSign Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN) and its subsidiaries provide domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, enabling internet navigation for various recognized domain names worldwide.

The company enables the security, stability, and resiliency of internet infrastructure and services, including providing root zone maintainer services, operating two of thirteen internet root servers, and offering registration services and authoritative resolution for the .com and .net domains, which support global e-commerce.

It operates a directory for .name and .cc; and back-end systems for .edu domain names.

The company posted solid first-quarter results where earnings came in above analyst’s expectations, and net income was up 8.6% year-over-year at $194 million.