Berkshire holds $397B cash
- Berkshire Hathaway said on May 2 that first-quarter cash and Treasury bills reached a record $397.4 billion in Greg Abel’s first quarter running it. - Operating earnings rose 18% to $11.35 billion, while Berkshire sold about $8.1 billion more stocks than it bought and barely repurchased shares. - The pile matters because Berkshire still can’t find big deals at acceptable prices — even with Buffett now chairman and Abel in charge.
Berkshire is sitting on almost $400 billion in cash and Treasury bills. That is the headline, but it is not really a victory lap. It is more like a giant “nothing is cheap enough yet” sign hanging over the market. In Berkshire Hathaway’s first-quarter 2026 results, released May 2, the company said cash, cash equivalents, and U.S. Treasury bills climbed to $397.4 billion as Greg Abel posted his first quarterly report as CEO. Operating earnings still rose to $11.35 billion, so this is not a story about a business under stress. It is a story about a company generating money faster than it can deploy it. ### Why is that number such a big deal? Because Berkshire is huge already, and even by Berkshire standards this is extreme. The cash pile was up from roughly $373 billion at the end of 2025, which means tens of billions of dollars arrived in just one quarter and mostly stayed unspent. A lot of that money sits in short-term Treasury bills, so Berkshire is earning something while it waits for bargains big enough to matter. ### Where did the cash come from? Partly from the operating businesses, which had a strong quarter. Operating earnings rose 18% year over year to $11.346 billion. Insurance helped, and so did the railroad, utility, and manufacturing mix. Net income jumped to $10.106 billion, but Berkshire itself keeps warning people the number they prefer to read is the operating number — and that one was solid. ### Did Berkshire actually keep selling stocks? Yes. Berkshire sold around $24 billion of equities and bought about $16 billion, leaving it a net seller by roughly $8.1 billion in the quarter. That made this the 14th straight quarter in which Berkshire sold more stocks than it bought. So the cash mountain is not just a byproduct of business profits. It is also the result of management continuing to trim investments faster than it adds new ones. ### Why not just buy back Berkshire shares? That is the obvious question, and the answer is: they barely did. Berkshire repurchased only about $234 million of its own stock in the quarter, its first buybacks since May 2024, and it did not buy back shares in the first two weeks of April. Basically, Abel and Buffett are sending the same signal on
