Warren Buffett’s successor is making sure the legendary investor gets the credit he deserves.
Greg Abel, who took over as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO at the start of this year, highlighted four of Buffett’s most successful stock picks in his first shareholder letter on Saturday.
Abel included a table that lists Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, and Moody’s, along with Berkshire’s ownership percentage of each company.
For each position, it shows how much it cost Berkshire, what it’s worth now, and what it paid to Berkshire in dividends last year:
The first entry is Berkshire’s Apple stake, which Buffett built between 2016 and 2018 and grew into his company’s most valuable stock holding by far.
While Berkshire has offloaded most of the position in the past couple of years, it still owned 1.6% of the iPhone maker at the end of 2025.
Berkshire paid about $6.3 billion for those remaining shares a little over a decade ago; they were worth $62 billion at December’s close, making the stock a ten-bagger for Buffett.
“Tim Cook has made Berkshire a lot more than I have made Berkshire,” Buffett quipped about Apple’s CEO during last year’s shareholder meeting.
American Express and Coca-Cola are the second and third entries in the table. Buffett finished building those stakes in the mid-1990s and hasn’t touched them since.
Berkshire’s 22.1% piece of the credit-card giant cost it $1.3 billion. The position was worth just over $56 billion at the end of December, meaning Buffett made nearly 45 times his money on paper.
The 9.3% stake in the soda titan also cost $1.3 billion, and was worth $28 billion at December’s close — a roughly 21-fold increase.
Buffett touted both wagers in his 2022 letter, holding them up as examples of how long-term, concentrated investing can generate huge returns.
“Over time, it takes just a few winners to work wonders,” he wrote. “And, yes, it helps to start early and live into your 90s as well.”
The fourth and final entry is Moody’s, which Buffett invested in back in 2001. Berkshire’s nearly 14% stake in the credit ratings agency cost it $248 million and was worth nearly $13 billion at the end of 2025, representing a 51-fold gain.
Together, the four holdings were worth 17 times what they cost Berkshire at December’s close. They yielded a combined $1.7 billion of dividends last year, or about 18% of what Buffett paid in total for them. That means Berkshire would only have to collect that dollar figure in dividends for six years to make back the full cost of the positions and more.
“This is both a tribute to, and a documentation of, Warren Buffett’s stock picking ability over time through year-end 2025,” David Kass, a longtime Berkshire blogger and finance professor at the University of Maryland, told Business Insider about the table.
For many years, Buffett published a similar ranking of Berkshire’s 15 largest stock holdings, but it hasn’t featured in the past three annual reports.
Along with reviving the list, Abel included a comparison of Berkshire’s stock performance vs the S&P 500. It showed that Buffett oversaw a 6,100,000% return over six decades, compared to the index’s roughly 46,000% return, including dividends, over the same timeframe. Berkshire’s compounded annual gain was 19.7%, or nearly double the benchmark’s 10.5%.
By highlighting Buffett’s track record as an investor and four of his most lucrative stock picks, Abel has shown why he believes his old boss is a “very hard act to follow.”
Read the full article here
