Greg Abel Just Quietly Dumped a Major Berkshire Holding. Here Is What Buffett’s Successor Is Buying Instead.

When Warren Buffett officially retired from day-to-day leadership at Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) on December 31, 2025, it closed a six-decade era. Buffett had transformed Berkshire from a struggling New England textile mill into a trillion-dollar conglomerate with stakes in some of the world’s most dominant businesses. His successor, Greg Abel, wasted no time putting his own stamp on the portfolio.

Abel officially became CEO on January 1, 2026, and investors quickly got a clearer picture of how he plans to reshape Berkshire in the post-Buffett era. His first full quarter running the company produced one of the most sweeping portfolio overhauls in years — more exits, bigger bets, and a sharper focus on a smaller set of high-conviction positions.

Abel slashes legacy holdings and cuts deep into the equity book

One of the clearest early signals under Abel has been the aggressive pruning of positions previously associated with former Berkshire investment manager Todd Combs. Combs, who joined Berkshire in 2010 and later served as CEO of GEICO, departed the company in January 2026 to lead JPMorgan Chase’s Strategic Investment Group, part of the bank’s Security and Resiliency Initiative. His exit, announced December 8, 2025, cleared the way for a clean break with several of those bets.

The scale of the Q1 2026 cleanup was striking. According to the 13F filing released May 15, Berkshire exited stakes in 16 companies during the quarter. Complete sell-offs included Visa, Mastercard, UnitedHealth Group, Amazon, Domino’s Pizza, and Aon, among others. The portfolio shrank from roughly $274 billion to $263 billion, and the total number of holdings dropped from around 40 to just 26. The message from Abel was plain: concentrate on conviction, cut everything else.

Berkshire’s Bank of America position, one of the largest financial holdings Buffett built, was also trimmed. The Q1 2026 13F showed a modest reduction, part of a broader pattern of reduced financial-sector concentration that began under Buffett in 2024. Bank of America remains one of the portfolio’s largest holdings alongside Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Chevron — a top-five group that still accounts for roughly 68% of the entire book.

Abel bets big on Alphabet and doubles down on Japan

While Berkshire was trimming dozens of positions, Abel was making aggressive additions elsewhere. The headline move of the quarter was a 225% increase in Berkshire’s Alphabet position, a sharp pivot toward big-cap technology. That initial burst reflected approximately 40 million additional shares purchased across both Class A and Class C at a cost of roughly $13 billion. Then, in early June 2026, Abel committed an additional $10 billion to Alphabet through a private placement tied to the company’s $80 billion AI capital-spending raise, securing the shares at a 6.5% discount to market price. After Q2 additions, Berkshire’s combined Alphabet stake has grown to approximately $36.6 billion and now ranks as the conglomerate’s third-largest equity holding.

Abel also made what many observers called his first major acquisition as CEO: a $6.8 billion deal to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home Corp., which closed in July 2026. The deal deepens Berkshire’s already substantial footprint in U.S. housing alongside Clayton Homes and Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, and fits squarely within the value-oriented approach Abel inherited from Buffett.

On the international front, Abel has deepened Berkshire’s long-running bet on Japan’s five major trading houses, known as sogo shosha. In early May 2026, Berkshire crossed the 10% ownership threshold in all five companies: Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, and Sumitomo, after the companies agreed to relax the ownership ceiling that had previously capped Berkshire’s stakes. In September 2026, Abel traveled to Japan and met with the heads of all five firms, pledging that Berkshire intends to hold its positions “for many decades.” Reports since then suggest the conglomerate is actively considering raising its stakes further, potentially toward 15%.

The appeal of these holdings is straightforward by Buffett-style criteria. The trading houses trade at lower valuations than comparable U.S. businesses, generate substantial and growing cash flows, and have been accelerating dividend growth under pressure from the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s corporate governance reforms. Berkshire’s 2024 annual letter estimated dividend income from these Japanese positions at $812 million for 2025, against only $135 million in interest on the yen-denominated bonds Berkshire issued to partially fund the stakes — a carry spread that makes the math highly attractive.

Elsewhere, Abel resumed Berkshire’s share buyback program for the first time in roughly 21 months, repurchasing about $234 million worth of shares in Q1 2026. That was only the beginning: in Q2 2026, buybacks accelerated sharply to $4.5 billion in a single quarter, the largest repurchase total in years. Berkshire’s cash pile hit a record $397.4 billion at the end of Q1 2026 before pulling back to $365.5 billion by mid-year as Abel moved aggressively to deploy capital.

What Abel’s moves say about the post-Buffett era

Abel’s first full year offers a useful window into his capital allocation instincts. He has shown clear comfort concentrating further into the highest-conviction ideas, moving away from smaller positions that added complexity without adding proportional value. The exits from payment processors Visa and Mastercard, the full liquidation of Amazon, and the departure from healthcare names like UnitedHealth all reflect a willingness to make clean breaks rather than carry legacy positions indefinitely.

The pivot toward Alphabet is particularly notable. Buffett long resisted large technology bets, with Apple being the primary exception. Abel’s rapid, multi-stage build in Alphabet — from an inherited $5 billion position to a combined stake exceeding $36 billion within roughly a year — signals a broader comfort with platform-technology businesses that generate durable free cash flow at scale. On CNBC in September 2026, Abel explained the rationale in terms of firsthand AI evidence gathered from across Berkshire’s own operating subsidiaries, pointing to measurable benefits in insurance, energy, railroad, and manufacturing. “We have a lot of visibility from within our companies as to how we’re using AI, what type of benefits it’s delivering, so that brought incremental interest, and then we saw Google as a significant player,” Abel told CNBC’s Becky Quick.

Large American banks still generate massive profits and continue to benefit from relatively stable consumer spending. The BofA trim should be read as a rebalancing rather than a wholesale retreat from financials. The real story of Berkshire’s evolving portfolio is a consolidation around the highest-quality assets Buffett left behind, paired with an increasingly decisive willingness from Abel to add new ones on his own terms.

Currency risk and geopolitical volatility are genuine considerations when evaluating the Japanese trading houses. But Abel has been explicit and public in calling those positions permanent, not tactical, which suggests they will remain a core pillar of Berkshire’s portfolio for years to come regardless of near-term market conditions. His September 2026 trip to Tokyo, and the subsequent reports that Berkshire is weighing even larger stakes, underscored that commitment in concrete terms.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect that Berkshire’s Q1 2026 13F filing showed the total number of holdings falling from 40 to 26 (not 29 as previously stated), and that Berkshire’s combined Alphabet stake grew to approximately $36.6 billion and became the conglomerate’s third-largest equity holding after Q2 2026 open-market purchases — up from $31 billion cited at the time of publication. Post-publication context added includes Abel’s September 2026 visit to Japan, reports that Berkshire is considering raising its sogo shosha stakes toward 15%, the acceleration of share buybacks to $4.5 billion in Q2 2026, and confirmation that the Taylor Morrison acquisition closed in July 2026.

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