Abel leaves his mark on Berkshire Hathaway with two huge deals

He said all the right things, but the prolonged shuffling in the company’s stock indicated that shareholders wanted to see action. One weekend, at the end of May, they received them.

Greg, who took over as CEO in January Berkshire As Buffett’s successor, he agreed over the weekend to purchase the residential construction company Taylor Morrison Home for $6.8 billion. At the same time, he worked to promote another deal worth billions of dollars.

On Monday he provided the continuation: purchase of shares AlphabeticalGoogle’s parent company, for $10 billion.

“He’s extraordinarily efficient, and it’s probably even more noticeable because I’m slow and inefficient,” Buffett said of his successor in an interview. “Even at my peak, I couldn’t do in one day what Greg manages to do.”

These transactions are among the largest that Berkshire has promoted in recent years, and they show that Gregg is ready to adopt the operating methods that established Buffett’s success, along with putting his personal stamp on how Berkshire is managed.

“They signal to the market that Greg Abel is ready and willing to allocate capital to deals and is not afraid to enter an industry that is not currently in vogue, in the spirit of Berkshire’s traditional approach,” said Kathy Seifert, an analyst at CFRA Research.

The test of the new CEO

Since Buffett announced in May 2025 his intention to transfer the position of CEO at the end of the year, Gregg has been working to convince Berkshire’s shareholders that he will maintain the characteristics that made the company an unusual phenomenon in the American corporate landscape: a conglomerate of unrelated businesses, ranging from railroad and energy companies to children’s toys, alongside a dominant insurance activity and a significant investment portfolio managed by the CEO.

The new CEO entered the position with a reputation as an outstanding operational manager, able to examine with a critical eye the vast variety of businesses owned by the company. On the other hand, his abilities in selecting stocks and executing transactions were less clear. Some investors were not sure that Gregg had the ability to execute large transactions as Buffett did.

This helps explain why Berkshire’s Class A stock has fallen more than 6% over the past year. According to Dow Jones data, from the beginning of 2026 the stock will underperform the S&P 500 index by the largest margin since 1990.

One of the main questions that preoccupied investors was whether Gregg would start using some of Berkshire’s huge cash pool. At the company’s annual meeting in May, Greg told the shareholders that he had compiled a limited list of companies in which he was interested in investing, at the appropriate price. He also renewed the share buyback program, which had been frozen since 2024, and acquired a stake in an insurance company in Japan that deepened Berkshire’s operations in the country.

None of these transactions is expected to significantly reduce Berkshire’s cash balances, which stood at more than $380 billion at the end of March. However, each reflects the different style of deals that helped build Berkshire in the first place.

Back to Buffett’s methods

Taylor Morrison is a long-time company in an industry that does not currently enjoy the sympathy of investors, having been hit by high mortgage rates and expensive housing prices. This is exactly the type of company that Buffett used to buy enthusiastically for decades.

In fact, Gregg’s statement regarding the deal, that “home ownership remains a central component of the American dream, and this investment expands our ability to serve that market,” recalled his predecessor’s words in October 2008, when the financial world was facing its worst credit crisis in decades.

“In the short term, unemployment will rise, business activity will weaken and the headlines will continue to arouse concern,” Buffett wrote at the time in an opinion piece published in the New York Times. “That’s why… I buy American stocks.”

Berkshire added Alphabet to its investment portfolio in the third quarter of last year. even thoughdark Remaining the largest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio, the company’s weight in the technology sector was relatively low.

According to people familiar with the details, Greg spoke on Sunday with the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which represented Alphabet in the deal, to formulate the terms of Berkshire’s participation in Alphabet’s capital raising through the sale of new shares. He later spoke with Alphabet’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, and completed the deal on Monday. Berkshire bought the shares at a significant discount compared to their trading price on the market.

Henry Asher, president of Northstar Group, which owns Berkshire shares, said he was ignoring the stock’s declines and hoped Gregg would continue to make deals. “If it’s unhappiness, we’d love to have more of it,” Asher said. “I hope that at the same time the company will make significant own purchases of its shares at the current price levels.”

Changing the Berkshire model

In a bit of a departure from some of Berkshire’s past acquisitions, Gregg stated that he expects to “consolidate the homebuilding activities of our construction sites into an integrated platform.” The comments refer to Taylor Morrison and Clayton Homes, the manufacturer of manufactured homes owned by Berkshire.

Buffett has previously given the companies that Berkshire acquired a great deal of independence from each other, even in cases where one or more of them operated in the same industry. According to analysts and Berkshire followers, Gregg’s plan for the housing operation signals that the new CEO is beginning to make his mark on the conglomerate.

In preparation for the transfer of the reins to Greg, Berkshire took steps designed to bring together under joint management subsidiaries operating in similar fields. For example, last year, Berkshire appointed one CEO for the jewelry chains Helzberg Diamonds and Ben Bridge Jewelers. In December, Berkshire appointed a new president for its consumer products, services and retail operations.

“In some ways, it’s the opposite of Berkshire’s model,” Seifert said. “It will be interesting to see if Greg makes some adjustments to it.”