Berkshire Hathaway closed Friday just 1.4% below its all-time high, with the Class A shares at $798,000 and the B shares at $532.02. That is a notable recovery for a stock that fell more than 14% in the three months after Warren Buffett announced he would step down as CEO. The market worried that a "Buffett premium" was dissolving. A year and a half later, the evidence suggests the premium was really a bet on the machine Buffett built, and that machine is still running.
The most useful number in the story is the cash. Berkshire still holds roughly $360 billion in cash and Treasury bills, down about 4% from March once rail cash is excluded. With short-term rates elevated, that pile is a real earnings contributor and no longer a drag. Analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods point to those higher short-term rates as one reason the shares are climbing. Insurance float is working harder as well, helped by a quiet hurricane season so far. Together these show the conglomerate structure doing what it was designed to do: collect premiums, invest the float, and wait.
Under new CEO Greg Abel, though, patience is starting to look less absolute. Berkshire spent $4.5 billion on buybacks in the second quarter, built a stake in Alphabet now valued around $36 billion, and added positions in homebuilders. The surprise was Bending Spoons. Berkshire put $600 million into the company's July IPO, then added another $330 million at $33 a share in a private placement. At Friday's close of $47.07, Berkshire's roughly $930 million outlay is worth an estimated $1.4 billion. That is a gain of about 55% on paper, in a business that trades at a rich multiple and sits well outside the traditional value playbook. Morningstar's Greggory Warren called the move a positive for long-term investors. Barron's noted that many shareholders had hoped for more equity deployment but still found this pick unexpected.
Rotation is helping too. As money drifts away from high-flying AI names, older franchises are catching a bid. Coca-Cola, a $37.6 billion Berkshire holding, hit an all-time high and is up 34% this year. Chevron, a $19 billion position, is up almost 36% since early July and also set a record. Even so, Berkshire's B shares still trail the S&P 500 by 6.0 percentage points this year, after trimming a 17.5-point gap since June 1.
The takeaway for long-term investors is that Berkshire's recent run owes more to boring fundamentals than to any single headline: a fortress balance sheet that earns real interest, insurance profits, and a portfolio of durable cash-generating franchises. The open question is how Abel's slightly more active capital allocation performs over a full cycle. A company that can wait for years, then act decisively, holds a rare advantage. The next signal will be the September 30 portfolio disclosure next month, which should show whether the Bending Spoons stake was a one-off or the start of a broader shift in how Berkshire puts its cash to work.