Executive Summary
- Berkshire's Q1 2026 13F (filed 05/15/2026) shows a $263.1B portfolio across just 29 holdings — down from 45+ positions a year ago. This is the most concentrated Berkshire has been in decades.
- Buffett completely exited both Visa ($2.91B) and Mastercard ($2.28B) in the same quarter — a simultaneous dump of two textbook moat businesses that should rattle anyone who owns payment processors as a "forever stock."
- GOOGL surged 204% in a single quarter — Berkshire added $10.47B to Alphabet, the largest dollar-value addition in recent history. Combined with a new GOOG position ($1.03B), the total Alphabet bet is now $11.5B.
- Delta Air Lines is a new $2.65B position. Yes, the same man who publicly apologized for owning airlines in 2020 just bought $2.65 billion worth of Delta.
- The top 10 holdings now represent 90.72% of the portfolio. Berkshire is no longer a diversified conglomerate holding company — it's a conviction machine.
The Purge: 16 Positions Gone in 90 Days
Let's start with the number that nobody's talking about enough: sixteen.
In a typical Berkshire quarter, you might see two or three exits. In Q1 2026, sixteen positions were completely liquidated. That's not portfolio management — that's a controlled demolition of the old Berkshire.
The exits, grouped by theme:
Payment processors — Visa ($2.91B sold out), Mastercard ($2.28B sold out)
Healthcare — UnitedHealth ($1.66B sold out)
Consumer brands — Domino's Pizza ($1.40B), Diageo ($19.6M)
Insurance — AON ($1.27B)
Diversified/specialty — Amazon ($525M), Pool Corp ($702M), Charter Communications ($221M), HEICO ($327M), Formula One Group ($297M), Lamar Advertising ($152M), Allegion ($124M), Liberty Latin America x2 ($27M combined), Atlanta Braves Holdings ($4.6M)
Some of these are small — the Atlanta Braves position was barely $5M, barely a rounding error on a $263B portfolio. Fine. But the Visa and Mastercard exits are a different category entirely. Those deserve their own section.
Why Did He Dump Visa And Mastercard?
Here's the thing: these are not bad businesses. Visa generates ~54% operating margins. Mastercard is nearly identical. Both operate asset-light models — they don't lend money, they just process transactions and collect a toll. High switching costs, network effects, near-zero marginal cost per swipe. By every traditional moat metric, V and MA are exactly the kind of business Buffett has loved for fifty years.
So why sell both? Same quarter? Complete exits, not trims?
I see three plausible explanations, ranked by likelihood:
Most likely: Capital reallocation. Buffett needed $10+ billion in firepower for the Alphabet bet. Something had to fund it. Visa and Mastercard, held at solid gains, were the most "replaceable" in terms of future upside versus the conviction bets he was making. This isn't a condemnation of V and MA — it's a statement about Alphabet.
Plausible: Regulatory tail risk is real. The DOJ has been pursuing Visa for anti-competitive practices in debit card routing for years. A structural ruling against Visa's network exclusivity arrangements could dent their economics in ways that are hard to model. Mastercard faces parallel scrutiny in Europe. Buffett hates businesses whose economics depend on regulatory permissiveness he can't control.
Speculative but worth raising: The fintech erosion thesis. Real-time payment rails (FedNow, RTP), Apple Pay's growing tap-to-pay dominance in-person, Stripe's embedded finance infrastructure, and the gradual but real adoption of stablecoin settlement are all putting incremental pressure on the "Visa processes everything" narrative. The moat isn't gone. But it's no longer the impenetrable fortress it was in 2015.
My read: it's primarily #1, meaningfully #2, and a whisper of #3. But when you exit $5.2B worth of two identical businesses in a single quarter, you're sending a signal. Whether the market is reading it correctly is another question.
The UNH exit ($1.66B) is easier to explain. Between the Brian Thompson assassination, the subsequent national conversation about health insurance practices, and Congress eyeing managed care for cost-control measures, UnitedHealth's regulatory environment has turned hostile. The business is structurally sound, but Berkshire doesn't need headline risk in a $263B portfolio that's already under a microscope.
The Google Gamble: $11.5B Into Alphabet
This is the story of the quarter. Full stop.
Buffett added 36.4 million shares of GOOGL — a 204% increase — at an estimated cost of $10.47 billion. He also initiated a brand-new position in GOOG (Class C shares) worth $1.03B. The combined Alphabet position is now $15.6B (GOOGL) + $1.03B (GOOG) = $16.6 billion, making it Berkshire's 7th-largest holding and climbing fast.
For context on the size: $10.47B added in a single quarter is more than the entire AUM of most hedge funds. This isn't a toe-in-the-water position. This is Buffett saying, with conviction, that Alphabet is mispriced at current levels.
Let's be honest about what makes this remarkable. Buffett famously admitted — multiple times, publicly — that he should have bought Google in the early 2000s when he could see the search dominance clearly. He knew it was a great business. He sat on his hands anyway. That regret has been part of Berkshire lore for two decades.
Whatever hesitation he had then, he doesn't have it now.
Why Alphabet, And Why Now?
Here's the argument Buffett is implicitly making: Alphabet is not a tech stock. It's a toll road.
Google Search processes roughly 8.5 billion queries per day with no viable competitor. Its operating margin in the Search segment runs above 40%. YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine and a global TV network Berkshire could never build — it monetizes content it doesn't produce. Google Cloud is the #3 hyperscaler with the fastest revenue growth rate of the three majors. And Waymo, quietly, is the only autonomous vehicle operation running tens of thousands of paid rides in multiple cities.
At approximately 20x forward earnings, Alphabet trades at a discount to the S&P 500 multiple. It generates more free cash flow than Coca-Cola and ExxonMobil combined. Its ROIC is consistently above 20%.
What does that sound like? It sounds like a business Buffett would have described as his "dream company" in any decade other than the one it actually operates in. He's finally buying it.
The move to hold both GOOGL (Class A, voting) and GOOG (Class C, non-voting) is interesting. It suggests the Alphabet position may grow further — Class C shares are often used by institutional buyers who want pure economic exposure without the voting complexity. Expect this position to be larger by Q2.
The Airline Comeback Nobody Expected
In May 2020, Buffett sat at the Berkshire annual meeting — livestreamed to an empty arena in Omaha — and told shareholders he'd sold every airline share Berkshire owned. All four carriers. At a loss. He said the world had fundamentally changed and he didn't know what aviation would look like on the other side.
Six years later, he just put $2.65 billion into Delta Air Lines (DAL).
This is a new buy — not a trim, not a re-entry into an old position. A clean, fresh, $2.65B conviction trade.
Delta is not the airline it was in 2020. The SkyMiles loyalty program has evolved into a financial services business that happens to own airplanes — the program generates revenue from American Express co-branded card spending that's more stable and predictable than ticket sales. Premium cabin demand has outpaced coach recovery significantly since COVID. And with American's balance sheet still under strain and Southwest navigating existential activist pressure, Delta has cemented itself as the operationally superior carrier in the U.S. market.
Is this Buffett's decision or Greg Abel's? Probably both, and that matters. Abel is increasingly Berkshire's operational voice. If this DAL bet reflects Abel's thesis on the airline industry, it's a preview of how Berkshire will think about capital allocation in the post-Buffett era. The style — find a dominant operator in a consolidated industry, buy at a reasonable price, hold — is pure Omaha.
The Concentration Machine
Run the math: AAPL ($57.8B) + AXP ($45.9B) + KO ($30.4B) = $134.1B. Three positions. More than half of a $263B portfolio.
The top 10 holdings account for 90.72% of Berkshire's entire disclosed equity portfolio. That leaves 19 positions — from SIRI to Macy's to NVR — collectively representing less than $5B. They're not signals. They're footnotes.
This level of concentration is extreme by any standard except Buffett's own. He has argued for decades that diversification is a hedge against ignorance — that if you genuinely understand a business and believe in it, owning 5% of your portfolio is too little, not too much. The Q1 2026 13F is the purest execution of that philosophy we've seen from Berkshire in years.
There's also a practical argument for what's happening: Buffett is 95. Greg Abel is stepping into the CEO role. A portfolio of 29 positions — with 90% of the value in 10 names — is infinitely more manageable for a transition than a sprawling 45-stock holding company. I think this simplification is intentional, and I think it's the right call.
What This Means For Retail Investors
According to 13Radar's latest 13F tracking data (filed 05/15/2026, for the period ending 03/31/2026), Berkshire's quarterly turnover was just 5.70% — meaning most of the portfolio didn't move. The exits and additions were concentrated and deliberate. That's the first lesson.
Three things worth examining for anyone who follows smart money:
1. Re-examine the payment processor thesis. V and MA have been treated as permanent fixtures in value portfolios for over a decade. Buffett held Visa for roughly 8 years before exiting everything in a single quarter. That doesn't mean you should sell — but it means the "unassailable moat" story deserves a harder look than it's getting right now. Regulatory risk is real. Fintech competition is slow-moving but directional.
2. The Alphabet re-rating case is not over. If the most famous value investor alive is putting $11.5B into GOOGL at current prices, he sees a margin of safety in the valuation. Google's AI integration (Gemini in Search, Workspace, Cloud), YouTube's ad market recovery, and Waymo's monetization pathway are all underappreciated in the current multiple. The stock is not cheap in absolute terms, but relative to its earnings power and competitive position, it may be the most Buffett-ish large-cap trade available.
3. You are probably over-diversified. Berkshire just cut from 45+ positions to 29, with 90% of the money in 10 names. Most retail investors hold 20-40 positions they couldn't convincingly pitch in a job interview. Buffett's Q1 2026 is not subtle: cut what you don't believe in, concentrate where you do.
The Bottom Line
Buffett sold Visa. He sold Mastercard. He sold UnitedHealth, Domino's, Formula One, and eleven other businesses. Then he poured $11.5 billion into Google and $2.65 billion into the airline he publicly swore off in 2020.
At 95 years old, this is not a man hedging his bets.
The Oracle just ran the most aggressive portfolio purge of the last decade — and the message is the same one he's been delivering since 1965: own fewer things, understand them completely, and hold with conviction.
The only question is whether anyone's actually listening.