Warren Buffett Avoided Tech Stocks for 60 Years — His Last Move as CEO Was Buying This Stock

For quite some time, billionaire Warren Buffett wasn’t a fan of technology stocks.

That’s because the billionaire, who advises us to buy what we know, didn’t know enough about tech, opting for companies he could reasonably understand.

He also liked to buy into companies that had slow-moving moats, such as consumer goods and insurers. And he liked companies with predictable cash flow. With tech, he argued, if a business model changes every 18 months, there’s no real way to gauge earnings power.

So, for years, he avoided tech.

Until 2011, when he invested in IBM

By 2011, he finally started investing in tech, most notably in IBM (NYSE: IBM). At the time, Buffett did say the investment went against his no-tech-company-rule because he’d been “hit between the eyes” by how IBM finds and keeps clients, he said, as quoted by CNBC. “It’s a company that helps IT departments do their job better,” he added. “There is a lot of continuity to it.”

Then, by the first quarter of 2016, his Berkshire Hathaway firm bought 9.81 million shares of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) for about $1 billion. That’s because Buffett didn’t view Apple as a tech company. Instead, he viewed it as a consumer product firm with a powerful brand and an even stronger ecosystem. After all, millions of us loyally stick with Apple products, which creates recurring streams of income. Plus, Apple’s iPhone had high switching costs and a user ecosystem, resembling a moat he would hunt for.

He would go on to invest in other tech stocks, such as VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN), in 2022. He also bought Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) shares around 2019 thanks to the company’s massive moat.

Then, before retiring, Buffett would buy shares of Alphabet 

Before retiring, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took a $4.3 billion stake in Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) thanks to the company’s network effect. In Plain English, Alphabet became more valuable the more people used it. Millions of people use it, which created a powerful network effect that may have become too much for Buffett to ignore any longer.

Plus, it became impossible to ignore the double-digit revenue growth of subscription, platforms, devices, and Google Cloud. That, and Alphabet’s newest AI Overviews had already attracted about two billion monthly users, which strengthened its network effect.

Making itself more attractive, the company said it would spend $200 billion on capex, instead of the expected $150 billion. According to CEO Andy Jassy, that’s happening because of strong demand for existing Alphabet offerings and opportunities in AI, semiconductors, and semiconductors.

Alphabet’s earnings have been just as impressive

In its most recent quarter, Alphabet posted EPS OF $2.82, which beat estimates by 18 cents. Revenue of $113.82 billion, up 18% year over year, beat by $2.34 billion.

In addition, as noted by Seeking Alpha, “Google Services revenues increased 14% to $95.9 billion, led by 17% growth in Google Search & other,17% in Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices, and 9% in YouTube ads.”

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, added: “It was a tremendous quarter for Alphabet and annual revenues exceeded $400 billion for the first time. The launch of Gemini 3 was a major milestone, and we have great momentum. Our first party models, like Gemini, now process over 10 billion tokens per minute via direct API use by our customers, and the Gemini App has grown to over 750 million monthly active users. Search saw more usage than ever before, with AI continuing to drive an expansionary moment.”

“We continue to drive strong growth across the business. YouTube’s annual revenues surpassed $60 billion across ads and subscriptions; we now have over 325 million paid subscriptions across consumer services, led by strong adoption for Google One and YouTube Premium. And Google Cloud ended 2025 at an annual run rate of over $70 billion, representing a wide breadth of customers, driven by demand for AI products.”