Berkshire Hathaway's 13F Shows Abel Doubled Down on Alphabet, Delta and Homebuilders

Greg Abel just made his intentions clear. Berkshire Hathaway's Form 13F, filed with the SEC after the close on Friday, August 14, shows the company spent a net $19.8 billion buying U.S.-listed stocks in the second quarter. That's the biggest net buying quarter in at least three and a half years, according to techtimes, and it snaps a 14-quarter selling streak that ran from late 2022 through Abel's first months as CEO.

The headline move is Alphabet. Berkshire owned about 106 million shares of the Google parent worth $37.9 billion at the end of June, according to the filing reported by CNBC. That's an 83% jump in the position size for the quarter, and it makes Alphabet Berkshire's third-largest U.S. equity holding, trailing only Apple and American Express.

Much of that jump traces to a $10 billion private stock purchase Alphabet announced in early June to help fund its AI infrastructure spending, CNBC reported. Warren Buffett, now chairman at Berkshire after handing the CEO job to Abel on January 1, 2026, told CNBC he was behind the bullish call on Alphabet, with Abel's backing. Because it undercuts any narrative that Abel is simply erasing Buffett's fingerprints from the portfolio. This was a joint call.

Airlines and homebuilders get bigger bets

Berkshire also grew its stake in Delta Air Lines by 44% during the quarter, to 57.3 million shares worth about $5.4 billion at the end of June, per CNBC. This is significant given Berkshire famously sold its airline holdings in the early days of the pandemic, according to CNBC. Berkshire is now back in, and bigger.

Housing was another area of expansion. Berkshire boosted its Class A Lennar shares by nearly 30% to 13.1 million shares, worth roughly $1.19 billion, while Class B holdings rose 25% to about 298,000 shares, CNBC reported. Berkshire also disclosed a small new position in D.R. Horton, just 3,600 shares, but new nonetheless. Yahoo Finance noted that D.R. Horton shares rose after hours on the news.

The housing bet lines up with Berkshire's operating moves. The quarter also saw the completion of Berkshire's acquisition of Taylor Morrison, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based homebuilder, according to CNBC. Abel isn't just buying homebuilder stocks on paper. He's building out actual housing exposure through acquisitions too.

What Berkshire sold

The buying wasn't unlimited. Yahoo Finance's video segment on the filing noted Berkshire reduced stakes in Bank of America, Kroger, Capital One, Nucor, Ally Financial and DaVita, and fully exited Constellation Brands. Berkshire's cash pile fell to $365.5 billion at the end of June from a record $397.4 billion three months earlier, CNBC reported, as some of that dry powder finally got deployed into stocks and buybacks.

$365 billion in cash sitting on the sidelines is still an enormous number, even after the drawdown. Anyone hoping Abel would go all-in and spend it down fast is going to be disappointed. This is measured buying, not a fire sale of cash reserves.

Reading the 13F

A reasonable skeptic might ask whether a 13F really tells you much, given the lag. Institutional investors have 45 days after quarter-end to file, so this snapshot reflects positions as of June 30, more than six weeks old by the time it's public. Berkshire could have already trimmed or added to any of these positions since. That's a real limitation, not a conspiracy, and it applies to every fund manager's 13F, not just Berkshire's.

The filing also has structural blind spots. Short positions aren't disclosed under Section 13(f) of the Securities Exchange Act, according to techtimes. Berkshire's Japanese trading-house stakes in Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Itochu, Marubeni and Sumitomo don't show up either, since those trade on Japanese exchanges and get reported through separate Japanese regulatory filings. And any position still under SEC confidential treatment simply won't appear. So this is a partial picture of Berkshire's total equity exposure, not the whole map.

Yahoo Finance's segment also flagged a broader trend beyond Berkshire: Harvard University disclosed a $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, and Nvidia disclosed that its own stake in SpaceX was worth about $21 billion at the end of the second quarter, according to CNBC and Yahoo Finance. That's a separate story, but it underscores that 13F season in mid-August 2026 produced more than just Berkshire headlines.

The open question now is whether Abel keeps buying at this pace. Berkshire went 14 straight quarters as a net seller before this reversal. One quarter of $19.8 billion in net purchases could mark a genuine shift in strategy under Abel, or it could be an outlier tied to opportunistic bets like the Alphabet capital raise and the Taylor Morrison deal closing. The next 13F, due after Berkshire's third-quarter results, will show whether Abel is still buying or whether he's back to sitting on cash.