Capital Reallocation Emerges
The scale of the repositioning is hard to ignore. Berkshire picked up nearly 40 million shares of Delta during the first quarter of 2026. Berkshire's Alphabet position grew from 17.8 million shares at the end of 2025 to nearly 58 million shares by March 2026, a jump in value from 5.6 billion dollars to close to 17 billion dollars in a single quarter. Numbers like that do not happen by accident. That is not a confidence nudge. That is a statement of conviction. On the other side of the ledger, Berkshire trimmed or fully exited positions in Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, Domino's Pizza, and UnitedHealth. Part of this reshuffling follows the departure of Todd Combs, one of the portfolio managers Buffett had brought in to help manage the broader book. The portfolio Abel inherited is now clearly being rebuilt on his own terms.
Post Buffett Strategy Evolves
Warren Buffett once said that a farsighted capitalist at Kitty Hawk should have done future investors a favor by grounding the Wright brothers entirely, because no airline had ever managed to build a truly durable competitive advantage. He acted on that instinct in 2020, dumping all airline holdings as the pandemic hollowed out global travel demand overnight. Abel's return to Delta tells a different story. Premium travel has come back with more structural strength than many anticipated. Corporate mobility is recovering steadily, and Delta has carved out a reputation for pricing discipline and operational consistency that sets it apart from the sector Buffett once wrote off entirely. Buffett spent decades sidestepping technology, always maintaining that he could not reliably identify the long-term winners in a sector that moved faster than his analytical comfort zone. His Apple bet late in his tenure was the one exception, and even that was framed more around consumer loyalty than technology itself. Abel appears less constrained by that hesitation. Nearly tripling the Alphabet stake reflects a clear belief in AI infrastructure buildout, the resilience of digital advertising through economic cycles, and the compounding advantages of owning the dominant platforms of the internet age.