Warren Buffett spent years letting Berkshire Hathaway’s cash pile grow until critics called it embarrassing. His successor appears to have gotten the memo that the money was supposed to be spent eventually.
Greg Abel, who took over as CEO in January 2026 after Buffett’s 64-year run at the helm, is putting the company’s capital to work at a pace that suggests he has no intention of letting the reserves sit idle. Berkshire ended the first quarter of 2026 with $397.4 billion in cash and equivalents, the highest figure in the company’s history, up from roughly $373 billion at the close of 2025. Then Abel started writing checks.
The deals taking shape
The headline move is Berkshire’s all-cash acquisition of Taylor Morrison Home Corporation, finalized on July 24, 2026, at a price of roughly $6.8 billion. That represents a 24% premium to where Taylor Morrison’s shares were trading before the announcement.
Abel is using the deal to deepen Berkshire’s footprint in housing, intended to consolidate and enhance Berkshire’s current subsidiaries like Clayton Homes. US housing construction has lagged household formation for more than a decade, and homebuilders with strong land positions and operational scale are well-positioned if demand continues to outpace supply.
The second major move is Berkshire’s commitment of roughly $23 billion to Alphabet across a series of transactions, including a $10 billion private placement completed in June 2026. The result is a stake in Alphabet worth approximately $31.5 billion.
Abel also restarted share buybacks in the first quarter, though modestly: Berkshire repurchased $234 million worth of its own stock.
What Abel’s moves tell us about his playbook
A $6.8 billion homebuilder acquisition and a $23 billion technology stake, both executed within the first half of 2026, represent a meaningful velocity of capital deployment. The Alphabet position is tied to the long-term trajectory of digital advertising, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. Buying into a company at that scale via a private placement suggests Berkshire and Alphabet had a structured conversation about the terms, not just a market order placed through a broker.