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Berkshire Hathaway's stock price breaks free from the 'Buffett shadow' and reaches a record high

After nearly 18 months, the stock price of Berkshire Hathaway has completely wiped out all the gains lost after Warren Buffett unexpectedly announced that he would step down by the end of that year at the 2025 annual shareholders' meeting. CEO

On Friday, May 2, 2025, Class A shares closed at $809,350, and Class B shares closed at $539.80, both setting new historical closing highs. The shareholders' meeting was held the following day, on Saturday, May 3.

By Monday, May 5th, BRK.A fell by 4.9%, and BRK.B fell by 5.1%. CNBC.com pointed out that the announcement of a 14% decline in operating profits for the first quarter of 2025 on the same day may also have exacerbated the decline in stock prices.

The report also quoted soothing views from analysts, including UBS analyst Brian Meredith. At that time, Meredith predicted that under the leadership of the new CEO Greg Abel, the company's culture and strategy would “remain unchanged.”

"When Buffett left, he left behind a company that relied less on his investment capabilities and possessed a series of strong businesses with leading cash flows."

However, investors clearly did not feel reassured by this.

As stock prices fall, the market has begun to worry that what is known as the "Buffett premium" is disappearing.

Three months later, at the lowest closing price of that year, the high point of BRK.A had fallen by 14.3%, and the more widely held Class B shares also declined by nearly 15%.

Since then, both types of stocks have rebounded by 18%; on Tuesday of this week, they both surpassed their pre-announcement levels, setting new historical closing highs. On Thursday, they continued to rise, closing at $820,500 and $546.97 respectively, breaking new records. On Friday, they fell by nearly 1%, but still remained about 0.5 percentage points above their highs before the 2025 annual general meeting of shareholders.

Berkshire's increase has narrowed its lag relative to the S&P 500 index this year to less than 4 percentage points.

October Sprint

From the low point in August 2025 to the current net increase, most of it has occurred this month.

Since the beginning of October, Berkshire Class B shares have risen by nearly 9%, significantly outperforming the 0.4% decline of the S&P 500 index, as well as the nearly 4.8% decline of the equal-weight NYSE Fang + index. The latter tracks 10 large-cap tech stocks, including Meta, NVIDIA, and Alphabet.

In recent weeks, investors have been pulling out of the rapidly rising tech sector and AI stocks, as the market increasingly worries that the huge expenditures these companies make on computing infrastructure may not necessarily lead to the sustained profits they had envisioned.

In contrast, a headline in Barron’s Weekly this week claimed that Berkshire Hathaway is the “ultimate anti-AI target.”

"Berkshire holds over $350 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet, and its annual after-tax earnings from diversified businesses are close to $50 billion, making it perhaps the most defensive giant stock in the market."

In the CNBC “Morning Call” Monday morning program, Adam Patti, who tracks Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings of ETF, stated that it is timely for the market to shift away from the long-term “momentum-driven frenzy.”

It took the market a year to value Berkshire Hathaway without Warren Buffett. I think it has finally decided that Abel can indeed manage the company well, and they also like the fact that Abel is making use of the company’s cash.

"Berkshire is like a tightly coiled spring. Once it returns, it will do so quickly and violently."

However, as Patti said, Berkshire has not completely detached itself from the AI world.

CEO Greg Abel once stated that as long as it does not cause the rates for other customers to rise, providing power to the growing AI data centers represents a "major opportunity" for Berkshire Hathaway and Berkshire Hathaway Energy.

In addition, Berkshire currently holds shares of Alphabet worth $34 billion, and Alphabet is one of the most important participants in the AI sector.

Buffett and Berkshire on the Internet

Some links may require a subscription:

• Zacks on Yahoo Finance: Berkshire Hathaway B ( BRK.B ) still rises amidst market declines: Things you need to know

CNBC A Selection from Warren Buffett's Profile

Berkshire's Hidden Billions in Errors (2001)

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett admit that their biggest mistakes are often "omission errors," which do not appear on Berkshire Hathaway's balance sheet.

Audience: Mr. Munger, I know you like to use humility to promote rational thinking. So my question is, what was the recent business mistake you made, and why did it happen? (Laughter)

Warren Buffett: I'm going to write this down. (Laughter)

Charlie Munger: The most serious mistakes in Berkshire's history are those of omission. They don't show up in our numbers; instead, they are reflected in the opportunity cost.

In other words, we had the opportunity, and we were almost ready to take action. In hindsight, we can be certain that not doing so was a huge mistake.

In terms of shareholders, these are truly the most costly mistakes in our history. Few management teams seriously consider or discuss opportunity costs.

However, Warren, we have already missed it—

Warren Buffett: Billions, billions, billions. I might as well say that. (Laughter)

Charlie Munger: Yes, yes. And we continue to make those mistakes. (Laughter)

Warren Buffett: Some might say that we are getting better and better in this regard. (Laughter)

Charlie Munger: I don’t like to mention specific companies, because—you know, we might want to buy them again in the future, and we might have the opportunity to do so at our price.

But in reality, whether in life or in business management, what truly comes at a high cost, compared to what could have been easily achieved, are those missed opportunities. I mean, that's really a substantial amount of money...

Warren Buffett: I would like to add one more point. When we talk about missed errors—there are many of them, and some are quite significant—we are not referring to situations where we fail to buy a particular stock. For example, maybe a friend is managing it, or we know its name, and its price goes from $1 to $100. That’s not considered a mistake. We only consider mistakes as those that fall within the scope of our capabilities.

If there is anyone who knows how to make money from cacao beans, or from software companies, or in any other field, and we have missed that opportunity, then in our view, that would not be considered a mistake.

The real mistake is when we clearly understand something, yet we just stand there and do nothing about it.

Or even worse, what really irritates me is that we only did a tiny amount of work. We clearly could have done so much more, but we only managed to do a fraction of it, just like a droplet from a dropper.

Charlie elegantly referred to this situation as: “I’m sucking my finger.” (Laughter)

And indeed – what I mean is, we sometimes make such “fingering” mistakes even in areas of business that we know very well.

This might be because after we started buying, the price rose a little bit, so we just waited, hoping to buy more at the initial price – there could be many reasons for this.

But these are all huge mistakes. Traditional accounting, of course, would never record them at all. However, they are all recorded in our scorebooks.

Berkshire Hathaway Stock Observations

Surrounding

Twelve months

BRK.A Stock Price: $813,595.00

BRK.B Stock Price: $542.19

BRK.B Price-Earnings Ratio ( TTM ): 13.64

Berkshire's market value: $1,160,823,061,693

Berkshire's cash as of June 30: $365.5 billion (a decrease of 8.0% from March 31)

After excluding cash from railway operations and deducting treasury bonds payable: $359.2 billion (a decrease of 3.8% compared to March 31)

Berkshire repurchased $4.5 billion of its own shares in the second quarter of 2026.

Berkshire's Major Stock Holdings - October 23, 2026

Based on the latest closing prices, here is a list of Berkshire Hathaway's publicly traded stock holdings in the United States and Japan, sorted by market value.

Position data as of June 30, 2026, based on Berkshire Hathaway's 13F filing submitted on August 14, 2026; the position data for Mitsubishi as of April 30, 2026 is also included.

The complete list of holdings and the current market value can be viewed in Berkshire Hathaway's Holdings Tracker at CNBC.com.

Questions or comments

If you have any questions or comments regarding this communication, please send them to alex.crippen @ cnbc.com. (Sorry, we will not forward your questions or comments to Warren Buffett himself.)

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In addition, Buffett's annual letter to shareholders is also very worth reading and is available on the Berkshire Hathaway website.

—— Alex Crippen, Editor of Warren Buffett Watch