Greg Abel Clears Out Amazon and Bets Big on Bending Spoons at Berkshire

Greg Abel isn't easing into the corner office. Berkshire Hathaway's new CEO, who took over after Warren Buffett retired at the end of last year, tore through the conglomerate's $364 billion investment portfolio in the first quarter — dumping 16 stocks and building a sizable stake in Alphabet, according to Yahoo Finance.

The headline exit: Amazon. As recently as September 2025, the e-commerce and cloud giant was a roughly $2.2 billion position for Berkshire, a holding that had been in the portfolio since early 2019 and had climbed to a triple-digit percentage gain. Abel rang the register.

Why walk away? Profit-taking is one read — Abel, like Buffett, likes to concentrate money in his best ideas. But the bigger catalyst may be people, not prices. Former investing lieutenant Todd Combs decamped to JPMorgan Chase, and several of the 16 stocks Abel cleared out were positions Combs had previously overseen.

Amazon's business itself hasn't wobbled. AWS still swallows more than a quarter of all cloud infrastructure services spending, and growth in that higher-margin segment has reaccelerated as generative AI and large language model workloads get bolted on. Berkshire simply decided it was done owning the story.

While everyone fixates on Alphabet becoming one of Berkshire's largest positions, the sharper plot twist is Bending Spoons. Abel has bought shares of the tech-driven merger and acquisition platform on two separate occasions, per Yahoo Finance, backing one of Wall Street's hottest tech IPOs.

That's two big tech bets from a shop long famous for banks, railroads and soda. Abel is rewriting the playbook in his first year — and Berkshire watchers now have a new question to chew on: what does he buy next?