Berkshire Hathaway's first Abel-era 13F arrived after Friday's close and showed a portfolio that shed names faster than it added them. The book shrank from $274 billion to $263 billion, from forty positions to twenty-six. Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, Domino's Pizza and UnitedHealth are gone. [1]

The paper's Thursday discipline was to read the filing, not the vibe. The vibe got most of Saturday morning's coverage anyway. AP led on Alphabet, which Berkshire more than tripled to roughly fifty-eight million shares, and the new $2.6 billion Delta Airlines position. [1] Forbes worked the same angle. Seeking Alpha's portfolio update enumerated the additions and the exits side by side, but most readers stopped at the additions. [2]

The exits are the more interesting page. Visa and Mastercard had been Berkshire holdings since 2011, the kind of payment-rail businesses Charlie Munger called the closest thing in finance to a tollbooth. Amazon entered the book in 2019 under Todd Combs; UnitedHealth was a 2024 buy that briefly looked like a contrarian play on managed care. Domino's was a Combs-era pickup. The Combs association is not incidental. He left the portfolio-manager seat in late 2025, and the names most associated with him are the names that left the book first. [2]

That is a personnel story embedded in a filing. A 13F does not list which manager held which security; it lists what the firm owned on March 31. But the pattern is hard to miss. The new Abel-era book keeps the legacy Buffett core — Apple, Bank of America, American Express, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Occidental — and prunes the adjacent positions a different desk had built. The pruning is the editorial act.

X read the exits as a bank-war signal. The Visa-Mastercard departure looks, in that telling, like a retreat from regulated payments rails as stablecoin and bank-charter fights heat up; the UnitedHealth exit looks like a managed-care concession after the company's run of public failures. Both readings are too tidy. Berkshire does not generally signal sector calls through small-percentage exits. It signals them through size.

The size of what stayed is the relevant number. Apple remains the single largest position, and the filing did not show the kind of trim that would force the concentration question. Bank of America's reduction continued at a measured pace, consistent with the May 2 10-Q breadcrumb the paper noted. [4] American Express is intact. Chevron and Occidental still anchor the energy exposure. The Berkshire portfolio is still recognizably the one Buffett built.

What changed is the periphery. Alphabet at sixteen-and-change billion dollars is not a small bet; it is the first time Berkshire has held a megacap technology platform other than Apple at that scale. Delta at $2.6 billion is the first major airline position since the pandemic exit, and the Forbes write-up flags it as the most provocative line in the filing. [3] Macy's is a small new addition that probably matters less than its coverage suggests.

The forty-to-twenty-six compression is the other story the wire copy underplayed. Berkshire has been a concentrated book for years, but moving from forty to twenty-six names in a single quarter is a different operating tempo. It suggests Abel is comfortable owning fewer things at larger weights, which is the temperament every Berkshire shareholder has been told to expect and which the filing now begins to document.

The May 15 promise was that the filing would be the discipline and the personality narrative would have to wait for arithmetic. The arithmetic arrived: a smaller book, a tighter list, a tripled bet on the one technology platform Berkshire had been late to, and a quiet exit from the adjacencies a different portfolio manager had assembled. The headline writes itself either way. The footnote is more honest.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco