Old Warren, nearing the end of his watch at Berkshire Hathaway, started shedding stock like a snake skin. Thirteen quarters of selling, mostly. Not a bad run, really. Ended up with a pile of cash—$373 billion, give or take—enough to buy a small planet, or at least a lot of dividend-paying stocks. So it goes.
He trimmed Apple, naturally. And Amazon, too. Four and a half billion dollars worth of trimming. That’s a lot of paper, or electrons, depending on how you look at it. But Warren wasn’t just selling; he was making a bet. A bet on something…older. Something with roots. A newspaper, of all things.
Cutting the Winners
Apple. He loved Apple. Threw thirty billion at it a while back. Paid off, of course. It became half his portfolio. A little too much, maybe. Even he admitted that. Sold off a good chunk, still has sixty billion tied up in it. Not a bad consolation prize. He always said a concentrated portfolio wasn’t a problem, but even he had his limits. The stock’s price-to-earnings ratio climbed, you see. Went from reasonable to…optimistic. Around 31 times earnings now. A bit rich for my blood, honestly. A dividend hunter likes to see a little more value.
Amazon, too, got the axe. He’d held it since 2019, likely thanks to a fellow who moved on. Seems Berkshire was just cleaning house. Amazon’s price-to-earnings ratio had come down, though. Still a bit pricey, but not as bad as it once was. The worry now is all that money Amazon is throwing at data centers. Artificial intelligence is expensive, you see. Means less cash for shareholders. Which, as a dividend hunter, I find…discouraging.
Out with the Old, In with the…Older
Warren, in his last letter to shareholders, said Berkshire wasn’t keen on newcomers. Said it with a little chuckle, I suspect. He likes things that have been something, for a long time. Like American Express and Coca-Cola. Reliable. Predictable. They’ve seen a few things, those companies.
So he bought into The New York Times. A newspaper. In 2026. Imagine that. Founded in 1851. A relic, some would say. But Warren knows a thing or two about relics. He used to sit on the board of Graham Holdings, which owned The Washington Post. A messy business, that one. The Post is struggling. Layoffs. Losses. The usual. So it goes.
But The New York Times is different. They’re making money. Revenue up nine percent. Profits up twenty-three percent. They’ve figured out the internet thing. Cooking content. Games. Sports. Product reviews. They’re selling subscriptions. Digital subscriptions, mostly. Almost ten bucks a month. Not bad. They’ve got almost twelve and a half million subscribers. And they expect more.
The stock isn’t cheap, of course. Thirty times forward earnings. Warren probably got a better deal. But a wonderful business deserves a premium. A dividend hunter might wait for a dip, but sometimes you just have to pay up for quality. Because, in the long run, that’s all that really matters. Everything else is just noise. And, eventually, so are we. So it goes.
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2026-03-07 21:22