Warren Buffett’s Best Stocks: Why Berkshire Bet $31 Billion on Google
Warren Buffett spent decades avoiding tech stocks. Now, he is personally behind a $31 billion investment in Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Moreover, Berkshire Hathaway acquired some of the shares directly from the company at a discount, something Buffett last did during the 2008 financial crisis. What does the legendary investor see in Google, why is he simultaneously warning about speculative market sentiment, and what can the average investor take away from the entire purchase?
Key points
Berkshire Hathaway holds a roughly $31 billion position in Alphabet. That’s larger than its legendary stake in Coca-Cola, which Buffett has held since 1988.
In an interview with CNBC, Buffett confirmed that he personally initiated the investment, not new CEO Greg Abel.
Ten billion dollars of the total position comes from a private placement of new shares that Alphabet issued to Berkshire at a roughly 7% discount to the then-market price.
In the first quarter of 2026, Alphabet accelerated revenue growth to 22%, Google Cloud rose 63%, and contracted cloud backlog reached $462 billion.
Capital expenditures of $180 to $190 billion annually squeezed the company’s free cash flow to just $10.1 billion for the quarter.
Alphabet reports second-quarter results on July 22 after the market close.
When Warren Buffett appeared on CNBC in mid-July, he resolved one of the biggest mysteries of this year’s investment season. Until that moment, the market had thought that the massive position in Alphabet, Google’s parent, was being built by Berkshire Hathaway’s new CEO $BRK-B Greg Abel. But the 95-year-old investor himself refuted that. And he promptly added that not buying Google earlier was a mistake.
The position has since grown to roughly $31 billion, making it the third-largest public equity holding in Berkshire’s portfolio, behind only Apple $AAPL and American Express $AXP. In any case, it is the conglomerate’s biggest tech bet since buying Apple.
Berkshire didn’t buy a large chunk of the shares on the market; it got them directly from Alphabet, freshly issued and at a discount. And in the same interview, Buffett said a sentence that almost nobody quoted – one that sounds more like a warning than a recommendation. Let’s break down the entire investment in context.
From IBM to Apple to Google: Buffett’s Long Journey to Tech
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