Berkshire's NYT Stake Looks Like New Abel, Not Old Buffett

BRK.A F -0.51% AAPL -1.43% ^GSPC -0.28% NYT -0.01%

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Let's start with what portfolio management looks like when you're piloting $561 billion. You trim Apple by 4.3%, which sounds like discipline until you realize the remaining stake is still worth $61.96 billion. That's more than the entire market cap of Ford. Buffett has been shaving Apple for years now, methodically turning a concentrated bet into something merely enormous, and the stock gained 9% in 2025 while the S&P 500 ran 16%. The position is too big, it's underperforming, and yet it remains Berkshire's crown jewel by a comical margin. Let’s call this “Trimming at scale.”

Now consider what appeared in the same filing: a $351.7 million stake in The New York Times, sitting at number 29 out of 41 holdings. Not a Buffett-sized conviction bet, but more like someone inside Berkshire wanted a food and games subscription business with pricing power, a paywall that works, and the kind of moat that comes from brand trust in an era when trust is the scarcest asset in media.

Here's the question worth asking: did Warren Buffett, Oracle of Omaha, steward of See's Candies, imbiber of Cherry Coke, soft serve addict, dirty joke enthusiast, and student of Ben Graham, decide in the final moments that his legacy required a position in the Gray Lady? Or did someone else at Berkshire, operating under the standing doctrine of "invest however you want as long as the philosophy holds," add a media name while the 94-year-old founder was busy writing his annual letter?

The smart money is heavily on Abel, and Berkshire's own structure makes that the only logical read. The firm has always given its investment managers room to build positions without asking permission. Todd Combs just left to run insurance at GEICO's parent. Ted Weschler is still managing a sleeve of the portfolio. Abel is now CEO, no longer heir apparent but the actual decision-maker. The portfolio is shifting from one generation's bets to another's, and we're watching it happen in real time through quarterly filings that land three months after the trades clear.

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This is how Berkshire has operated for over a decade. Amazon entered the portfolio in 2019, years after Buffett admitted publicly he was "too dumb" to buy it in the 1990s. One of his lieutenants disagreed and bought it anyway. Chubb appeared in filings last year, but only after Berkshire had already finished accumulating the position in silence (a move that required SEC approval to delay disclosure). The pattern is consistent: the managers buy what they want, the 13F filing reveals what already happened, and no one issues a press release explaining who picked what.

So when a $351 million New York Times position shows up in Q4 2025 filings (while Warren was packing his desk, by which we assume he was shoveling bridge strategy guides into a plastic shopping bag while telling his secretary a limerick), the most boring explanation is probably the right one. This wasn't Buffett tweaking his legacy on the way out the door. This was the new Berkshire, under Abel, operating exactly as designed: disciplined selling on the mega-cap, opportunistic buying in quality businesses, and zero theatrics about succession.

Buffett built a machine that runs whether he's in the building or not. That was always the point. If this is what the handoff looks like, it's the least dramatic transition imaginable. No press conference, no investor call, just a line in a quarterly filing and a stake small enough that it might not even warrant a question at the annual meeting in May.

Which is probably exactly how both men wanted it.

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