Filing: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway owned 9.81M Apple shares on March 31, valued at $1.07B
Legendary investor, who previously avoided technology stocks, also slightly increases position in IBM — Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. took a new position in Apple Inc. in the first quarter …
Context & Ripple Effects
In May 2016 this filing was the surprise: Buffett, long a self-declared avoider of technology stocks, opened a 9.81M-share Apple position worth $1.07B and nudged the firm's IBM holding slightly higher. What read as a token dip became the opening move of a decade-long arc — Berkshire nearly quadrupled the Apple bet to $7.7B within three quarters, then added 75M more shares ahead of its 2018 shareholder meeting.
The exit side of the arc matters as much as the entry: by mid-2024 Berkshire had slashed the Apple stake roughly in half, and the same filing-driven cadence now extends to a $4.3B Alphabet stake and deep cuts to Amazon. This 2016 disclosure is the data point where that playbook began.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a marquee endorsement from the investor who previously avoided technology stocks, while Berkshire's Q1 book simultaneously adds a consumer-hardware name alongside its slightly increased IBM position.
- The 13F makes Berkshire's entry public well after the fact, handing Apple a high-profile validation signal at a moment when Buffett's stamp still carries unusual weight with value-oriented capital.
Second-order effects
- The position escalates quickly in subsequent filings — quadrupled to $7.7B by early 2017, then 75M more shares by 2018 — which turns every future Berkshire disclosure into a recurring market event for Apple shareholders.
- Once Apple becomes a core Berkshire holding rather than a one-off experiment, the eventual decision to trim it carries systemic weight, which is exactly what the 2024 half-stake cut became.
Third-order effects
- The entry marks the start of Buffett's tech-aversion erosion visible across the corpus: a $4.3B Alphabet stake in late 2025 and heavy repositioning in Amazon and NYT shares show Berkshire acting as an active allocator in mega-cap tech rather than a permanent holder.
- If the pattern holds, Berkshire's quarterly filings function as a sentiment gauge for legacy value-capital entering and exiting big tech, with each disclosure resetting expectations for the next round of positioning.
The trend: Value-investing capital migrated from avoiding tech to actively managing mega-cap tech positions as core holdings, with Berkshire's decade of Apple filings as the template now repeating with Alphabet and Amazon.