Berkshire posts $11.35B operating earnings

Berkshire Hathaway is still doing the Berkshire thing — throwing off huge operating profits, piling up cash, and making the market wonder why that cash(berkshirehathaway.com)for it. On Saturday, May 2, Berkshire posted first-quarter operating earnings of $11.346 billion, up from $9.641 billion a year earlier, in Greg Abel’s (bloomberg.com) gets whipped around by paper gains and losses in the stock portfolio, so operating earnings are the cleaner read. (berkshirehathaway.com)d swings in that portfolio through the income statement. That can make quarterly net income look dramatic without saying much about how GEICO, BNSF, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Precision Castparts, and the rest of the empire actually performed. In this quarter, Berkshire said investment gains and losses included about $7.0 billion of losses tied to changes in unrealized gains, plus $5.8 billion of realized gains from investments it sold. That is why investors keep coming back to the operating number. (berkshirehathaway.com) ### So what actually improved? The short version is(berkshirehathaway.com)t rose year over year, helped by insurance and other major operating segments. That matters because insurance is still the engine room here — not just for underwriting profit, but for the float that gives Berkshire investable cash at enormous scale. Reinsurance trade coverage also pointed to stronger underwriting results in the quarter, which fits the broader picture of insurance carrying more of the load again. (berkshirehathaway.com) ### Why is the cash pile the real story? Because it is absurdly large now. Berkshire ended the quarter with roughly $397 billion in cash and s(berkshirehathaway.com) seller of equities by about $8.1 billion during the quarter. In plain English — Berkshire’s businesses kept generating cash, and Abel did not find enough big uses for it to stop the pile from swelling. (bloomberg.com) ### Didn’t Berkshire buy back stock? Yes, but only a little. Berkshire repurchased about $234 million of its own shares in the first quarter, which was notable mostly because it was the first buyback since th(berkshirehathaway.com) cash, that is basically a toe in the water, not a capital-allocation statement on the scale investors are waiting for. (marketwatch.com) ### Why does Greg Abel get more scrutiny than Buffett did? Because Buffett built up decades of trust tha(bloomberg.com)ry 2026, and this weekend’s annual meeting is the first one with him running the show while Buffett watches from the audience as chairman. Investors are trying to figure out whether Berkshire under Abel will look mostly the same, or whether he will have to be more aggressive just to prove the machine can still compound at Berkshire scale. (money.usnews.com)res have lagged the S&P 500 by 39 percentage points since Buffett said at last year’s meeting that he would step down as CEO. Some of that gap is style — Berkshire is heavy on insurers, railroads, utilities, manufacturing, and consumer businesses while the market has been pulled higher by tech and AI names. But some of it is also a referendum on whether Berkshire can still deploy capital well enough to beat by being boring. (money.usnews.com)the needle to move. A normal acquisition barely matters. A modest stock purchase barely matters. That means Abel’s challenge is not just finding good ideas — it is finding ideas big enough to matter without overpaying. (bloomberg.com) ### Bottom line The quarter says Berkshire’s operating machine is fine. The open question is capital allocation. Abel’s first report did not show a dramatic new playbook — it showed a stronger business, a record cash mountain, and the same old Berkshire problem, only bigger. (berkshirehathaway.com)