Berkshire Hathaway delivered strong second-quarter results and a more aggressive capital allocation posture after Warren Buffett’s departure, but the shift has drawn a sharp rebuke from investor Michael Burry. According to CNBC, Berkshire posted about $13 billion in operating earnings for the quarter, up roughly 16% from a year earlier, while net income more than doubled to about $25.67 billion.
The company also reported revenue of about $10.18 billion, up around 10%. Insurance operations, including GEICO, were relatively weak, but that was offset by stronger performance in manufacturing, services and retail, as well as energy and railroad business BNSF. Berkshire shares moved higher in Monday trading after the earnings release, the report said.
Abel ramps up buybacks and stock purchases
Greg Abel, who formally took over as chief executive in January, has started to put Berkshire’s large cash reserves to work more actively. Berkshire repurchased about $4.5 billion of its own stock in the second quarter, far above the $235 million recorded in the first quarter. It then added more than $3.3 billion in buybacks in July.
The bigger shift came in the equity portfolio. Berkshire ended a run of 14 consecutive quarters of net stock selling and moved to net stock purchases of about $19.8 billion to $20 billion. That included about $10 billion spent on shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and a roughly $6.8 billion cash acquisition of homebuilder Taylor Morrison.
Those moves reduced Berkshire’s cash and short-term securities from a record range of about $38 billion to $39.7 billion at the end of the first quarter to roughly $36.5 billion at the end of the second quarter. CNBC described that as the first quarterly decline in four years.
Burry says Berkshire is no longer attractive
Wall Street had largely read the buybacks and renewed net buying as a constructive signal, seeing them as evidence that management was putting capital to work and showing confidence in the stock. Burry took the opposite view.
Writing on Substack and X, Burry said his main concern is that Berkshire’s successors are “too old and ultimately not Buffett,” and therefore do not have Buffett’s patience and discipline to wait for a “fat pitch,” a term used for a high-probability, lower-risk investment opportunity.
“I now believe that concern has come true, and I no longer think Berkshire is an attractive investment,” Burry wrote.
He added that Berkshire still holds substantial cash and that the amount deployed so far is not especially large relative to the whole balance sheet. Even so, he said the early actions “look more like framing moves than actual investing moves.”
Debate builds around Berkshire after Buffett
The split in reaction captures the uncertainty around Berkshire in the post-Buffett period. The numbers were strong, the buybacks were large, and the company returned to net stock buying. At the same time, Burry’s criticism focused not on the quarter itself, but on whether the new leadership team can match Buffett’s style of capital allocation over time.
That tension is now shaping how the market reads Berkshire’s next steps.