Berkshire's Bigger Alphabet Bet Comes With $700 Million in SpaceX Exposure, By Accident

Warren Buffett never invested in SpaceX. He never invested in Tesla either, despite Elon Musk publicly badgering him about it for years. But Buffett's company just ended up with a piece of SpaceX anyway, through the back door.

Berkshire Hathaway's latest 13F filing, the second under CEO Greg Abel, shows the conglomerate increased its stake in Alphabet by 83% during the second quarter, according to Yahoo Finance. That brought Berkshire's position to nearly 106 million shares worth roughly $38 billion, making Google's parent company Berkshire's third-largest equity holding, trailing only Apple and American Express.

Buried in that number is an unplanned connection to Musk's rocket company. Alphabet has held a stake in SpaceX since 2015, when it invested about $900 million alongside Fidelity, according to Business Insider. As of June 30, that stake amounted to roughly 4% of SpaceX, valued at about $94 billion.

On Berkshire's 0.9% ownership of Alphabet, you get an indirect "look-through" interest, a term Buffett himself coined, of about $815 million in SpaceX at quarter's end, according to Business Insider's calculations. That figure works out to roughly 0.04% of SpaceX. Following declines in both Alphabet and SpaceX shares since June, Business Insider estimated the exposure had fallen to around $700 million by mid-August.

Nobody at Berkshire chose this

This isn't a SpaceX investment in any meaningful sense. Berkshire didn't buy shares, didn't negotiate terms, and didn't participate in SpaceX's IPO, which took the company public on June 12, 2026. Berkshire simply owns a large chunk of a company, Alphabet, that happens to own a smaller chunk of SpaceX.

Analytics Insight's coverage muddies this point by describing Berkshire's exposure as coming "through an ETF that owns shares" in SpaceX. That's not accurate. The exposure runs through Berkshire's direct equity stake in Alphabet, not through any fund structure. Alphabet is the intermediary, full stop.

The $700 million figure sounds like real money, and it is. Measured against Berkshire's balance sheet, it's a rounding error. The company held about $1.3 trillion in total assets and $324 billion in stocks at the end of June, according to Macrotrends data cited by Yahoo Finance. An indirect $700 million stake in a private space company is immaterial to Berkshire's overall results.

Why it still matters to Berkshire

Alphabet's SpaceX stake is not immaterial to Alphabet. Business Insider pegged that position's value at roughly $79 billion as of its reporting, or about 2% of Alphabet's total market value. Since Berkshire now has $38 billion riding on Alphabet, it has a real financial interest in how SpaceX performs, even if that interest is small on Berkshire's own books.

Musk has spent years publicly campaigning for Buffett's backing. Business Insider compiled a string of Musk's social media posts going back to 2021, including "He should take a position in Tesla. It's an obvious move" in 2024, and a 2023 jab that Buffett missed buying Tesla "when it was 0.1% of today's value." Buffett never budged, choosing instead to back Tesla's Chinese rival BYD for roughly 17 years, from 2008 until 2025.

Buffett's reluctance tracks with his long-stated skepticism of IPOs. He has argued the incentive structure around initial offerings favors sellers over buyers and that hype inflates valuations past what a disciplined investor should pay. The SpaceX look-through stake sidesteps all of that. Berkshire gets exposure to SpaceX's embedded value without underwriting IPO risk or paying IPO prices.

The bigger picture in Abel's second quarter

The Alphabet move wasn't Berkshire's only notable shift. The Associated Press, via Breitbart, reported that Berkshire also dumped stakes in Visa, Mastercard, Domino's Pizza, Amazon, and UnitedHealth Group following the departure of investment manager Todd Combs late last year. Breitbart's numbers reflect an earlier quarterly snapshot than the Alphabet figures reported by Yahoo Finance and Business Insider, so the specific share counts differ, but the trend is the same: Abel is putting his own stamp on the portfolio rather than simply continuing Buffett's playbook.

Buffett stepped down as CEO at the start of 2026 but remains Berkshire's chairman and largest shareholder. Whether Abel's aggressive tech accumulation, tripling then further expanding the Alphabet stake within roughly a year, signals a durable shift in Berkshire's investing philosophy or just conviction in one company remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, SpaceX shares themselves have been rough since the June IPO. BigGo Finance reported the stock had fallen about 40% from its post-IPO high of $225.64, trading near its $135 IPO price, as investors weigh heavy AI-related capital spending against the company's revenue growth. Ark Investment Management's Cathie Wood bought $28.1 million of SpaceX shares on August 21, according to BigGo, making it the third-largest holding in her Ark Innovation ETF. Neither SpaceX, Tesla, nor Berkshire responded to requests for comment sent by Business Insider.