Buffett Says He, Not Successor Greg Abel, Made the Call on Berkshire's $31 Billion Alphabet Bet

Warren Buffett cleared up two mysteries at once in a nearly hour-long interview with CNBC's Becky Quick, aired Wednesday, July 15. He said he, not Berkshire Hathaway CEO Greg Abel — who succeeded Buffett as chief executive on January 1, 2026, with Buffett now serving as Chairman — made the call to build the conglomerate's now roughly $31 billion stake in Alphabet. He also explained, in more detail than his written announcement did, why he's ending future donations to the Gates Foundation.

The Alphabet Reveal

Berkshire first disclosed a stake in Google's parent company in the third quarter of 2025, then more than tripled it in early 2026, according to Business Insider. In June, Berkshire added another $10 billion through a private placement, split evenly between Class A and Class C shares, as part of Alphabet's broader $84.75 billion capital raise to fund AI infrastructure, BigGo Finance reported.

Because Abel had just taken over as CEO, the assumption on Wall Street was that Alphabet was his signature first move. Buffett shut that down directly. "I initiated it," he told Quick, according to BigGo Finance. He was careful to frame it as no rift with his successor: "I am not doing anything that he doesn't approve of. He's not doing anything I don't approve of. We talk all the time, but he is the decider."

The stake has made Alphabet Berkshire's third-largest public equity holding, behind only Apple and American Express, per Business Insider. Buffett called missing Alphabet's early growth a mistake, but said the company is still more likely to succeed than "90% or 95% of what gets merchandised through Wall Street," according to BigGo Finance. He added a real caveat, though: he still prefers at least four or five other Berkshire businesses, including BNSF Railway and American Express.

Buffett also used the interview to warn about the broader market. "It's tough to find values when everybody is preferring gambling," he said, according to Business Insider. He argued that speculative money is chasing excitement over cash flow, especially around the AI buildout. Adam Schwartz of Black Bear Value Partners told Business Insider that Buffett is "warning investors not to avoid AI, but to be careful when speculation becomes the dominant force setting prices." University of Maryland finance professor David Kass told Business Insider Buffett appears "troubled" by hyperscalers like Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet spending hundreds of billions on chips and data centers, outlays that eat into cash flow and force some companies to raise outside capital.

Kass also pointed out the tension in Buffett's own position. Berkshire sat on a record $380 billion cash pile as of the end of March, and that caution has kept Buffett out of a market that's kept climbing anyway.

Why He's Cutting Off Gates

Buffett has given more than $47 billion in Berkshire shares to the Gates Foundation over roughly two decades, according to the Washington Examiner. He announced this week he's redirecting future giving, roughly $6 billion, to four family foundations: Susie Buffett's Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, Peter Buffett's NoVo Foundation, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late first wife. By Dec. 31, 2034, he says his remaining Berkshire stock, worth more than $140 billion, will be fully donated across those four foundations.

The timing, right after revelations in the Jeffrey Epstein files about Bill Gates' past association with the convicted sex offender, invited an obvious question. Buffett addressed it head-on with CNBC, and his answer was more measured than some coverage implied. He called Gates' Epstein ties "distasteful" but said the real driver of his decision was confidence in his own children. "I'm impressed by the fact that my kids really want to give the money away" efficiently, he told Quick, "without constructing huge buildings or holding conferences at esoteric places." He said he didn't have that same confidence in his children back in 2006, when the Gates Foundation donations began.

On Gates specifically, Buffett said he's read extensively since January 1, including Gates' congressional testimony, and drew a personal comparison rather than a condemnation: "I made mistakes in hiring all kinds of people or choosing friends and then finding out later that... they weren't what I thought they were. I found nothing in there that was beyond what I could picture myself doing." Gates has not been accused of wrongdoing by authorities or by any of Epstein's victims, and has said the two Russian-women affairs Epstein later learned of did not involve Epstein's victims, per the Washington Examiner citing a February Wall Street Journal report.

Buffett said the friendship itself continues. Gates visited him in Omaha roughly three weeks before the interview, and the two spent three hours together, with another meeting already proposed, Buffett told Quick. The Gates Foundation, in response to the funding cutoff, thanked Buffett for his contributions over the years, according to the Washington Examiner.

What's left unresolved is how much the Epstein connection actually weighed on the decision versus how much Buffett is simply reallocating to family. Buffett's own framing puts his kids' readiness front and center, not Gates' conduct, a distinction not every headline captured cleanly.