Ahead of annual shareholders meeting, Berkshire Hathaway reveals it bought 75M shares of Apple, adding to the 165.3M shares it already owned at the end of 2017
- In the first quarter, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought an astounding 75 million shares of Apple.
Context & Ripple Effects
This disclosure caps a rapid build-up that began small: Berkshire held just 9.81 million Apple shares worth $1.07 billion in early 2016, then nearly quadrupled the position to $7.7 billion in a single quarter of 2017 before today's 75-million-share addition on top of 165.3 million shares.
Revealing the purchase just ahead of the annual shareholders meeting turns the meeting into a de facto endorsement event — Buffett is putting Berkshire's balance sheet visibly behind Apple at peak conviction, a stance the later record shows was not permanent, with filings showing Berkshire eventually slashed the stake by roughly half across two quarters of 2024.
First-order effects
- Apple gains its most prominent long-term holder at scale, with Berkshire's position now exceeding 240 million shares — a signal to institutional investors that Buffett treats Apple as a core holding rather than a trade.
Second-order effects
- Fund managers benchmarked to Berkshire face pressure to justify underweighting a stock Buffett is aggressively accumulating, and Apple's investor-relations story gets a stability anchor that pure momentum holders cannot provide.
Third-order effects
- The accumulation-then-unwind arc visible in the corpus — building through 2016–2018, buying HP in 2022, cutting Apple in half by mid-2024 — points toward Berkshire operating as a concentrated position trader in mega-cap tech, not a permanent buy-and-hold owner, which reshapes how markets read each filing.
The trend: Berkshire Hathaway's Apple position evolved from a tentative 2016 starter stake into the template for how large value investors rotate into and out of mega-cap tech.