By JBizNews Desk | May 18, 2026
Berkshire Hathaway disclosed Friday in its first Form 13F filing of the post-Warren Buffett era that it exited its entire stake in Amazon.com during the first quarter, eliminated multibillion-dollar positions in card networks Visa and Mastercard, sold out of UnitedHealth Group, Aon and Domino’s Pizza, and reshuffled the portfolio with a new $2.65 billion investment in Delta Air Lines and a fresh stake in department-store operator Macy’s, according to the filing posted on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system. The quarterly report, the first since Greg Abel formally succeeded Warren Buffett as chief executive on Jan. 1, 2026, also showed Berkshire boosting its position in Alphabet Inc. and modestly adding to its New York Times Company holding, two of the more eye-catching tech-adjacent moves of the new regime.
The headline change is the return to commercial aviation, an industry Buffett famously abandoned during the COVID-19 panic of April 2020 when he dumped roughly $4 billion of airline holdings at a steep loss. The new 39,809,456-share Delta Air Lines Inc. position, valued at roughly $2.65 billion at quarter-end, sent Delta shares 3% higher in after-hours trading. CFRA Research analyst Catherine Seifert told Reuters the move “reads as an Abel signature trade — operational, capital-disciplined, and made when consensus had given up on the sector.” Berkshire also disclosed a smaller new stake in Macy’s Inc., the retailer Buffett had publicly criticized as recently as 2017 for losing ground to Amazon.
The exits are equally telling. The complete divestiture of Amazon.com Inc. closes a chapter that began in 2019, when Buffett disclosed an initial 536,000-share position and publicly admitted he had been “an idiot” for not buying earlier. Berkshire had already cut the Amazon stake by 77% in the fourth quarter of 2025, citing concern over Amazon’s roughly $200 billion in projected 2026 capital expenditures and the resulting collapse in free cash flow. The Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. exits, totaling several billion dollars combined, end positions originally established under former portfolio manager Todd Combs, who left Berkshire earlier this year to join JPMorgan Chase & Co. Combs’ departure has been cited by multiple analysts, including Edward Jones analyst James Shanahan, as the proximate trigger for the broad portfolio cleanup.
The Alphabet boost extends a move first signaled in the third quarter of 2025, when Berkshire disclosed a surprise 17.85-million-share Class C position valued at roughly $4.3 billion. The Q1 filing showed the conglomerate adding to both Class A (GOOGL) and Class C (GOOG) lines, deepening what is now the firm’s largest pure technology bet outside of Apple Inc. The continued accumulation contrasts sharply with the Amazon exit, suggesting Berkshire sees Alphabet’s Google Cloud backlog of roughly $462 billion and its emerging dominance in AI inference workloads as a cleaner free-cash-flow story than Amazon’s capital-intensive AWS expansion.
UnitedHealth Group Inc. was a quieter casualty. Buffett had personally initiated a contrarian $1.6 billion position in late 2025 after the insurer’s stock collapsed in the wake of CEO Brian Thompson’s December 2024 killing in midtown Manhattan and the federal investigation into the company’s Medicare Advantage billing practices. UnitedHealth shares had recovered only modestly through Q1, and Abel chose to take the loss and reallocate. The full exit from insurance broker Aon plc ended another Combs-era position, while the Domino’s Pizza Inc. sale closed a smaller stake that had never reached top-25 status in the portfolio.
Berkshire ended Q1 2026 with a record $397 billion in combined cash and short-term Treasury bills, up from $373 billion at year-end 2025, after the firm was a net seller of $8.1 billion in equities during the quarter. At the company’s May 2 annual meeting in Omaha — Abel’s first as CEO and a noticeably smaller affair than Buffett’s peak-era gatherings — the new chief told shareholders that Berkshire “will not deploy into subpar opportunities” and called patience “a core strength” of the franchise. Operating earnings for the quarter rose 18% year over year to $11.34 billion, with insurance underwriting earnings up 28% to $1.7 billion and float climbing to roughly $176.9 billion.
For markets, the filing offered the clearest read yet on how Abel intends to manage Buffett’s $382 billion legacy portfolio. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Palazola said in a note Friday afternoon that the moves “show a leader willing to make decisions, not just preserve them” — a pointed contrast to the late-Buffett era’s reputation for inertia. Berkshire Class B shares were little changed in extended trading following the disclosure. The portfolio remains anchored by Apple, American Express Co., Coca-Cola Co., Bank of America Corp. and Chevron Corp., though all five positions have been trimmed at various points over the past 18 months.
— JBizNews Desk
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