Apple remains Buffett’s biggest public stock holding, but his thesis about its moat faces questions
Tim Cook and Warren Buffett
Getty Images (L) | CNBC (R)
Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett was still using a flip phone as late as 2020, four years after his investment behemoth started amassing a huge stake in the company that makes iPhones.
“I don’t understand the phone at all, but I do understand consumer behavior,” Buffett said last year at Berkshire’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.
He’s emerged in recent years as one of Apple’s top evangelists.
At the end of 2023, Berkshire owned about 6% of Apple, a stake worth $174 billion at the time, or about 40% of Berkshire’s total value. That’s about four times bigger than Berkshire’s second-biggest public stock holding, Bank of America, and makes Berkshire the No. 2 Apple shareholder, behind only Vanguard.
As Berkshire investors and fanboys of the 93-year-old Buffett flood Omaha this weekend for the 2024 annual meeting, Apple is likely to be a hot topic of discussion. The tech giant on Thursday reported a 10% year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, leading to a 4% drop in total revenue. But the stock had its best day since late 2022 on Friday due largely to a $110 billion stock buyback plan and increased margins that result from a growing services business.
The bet on Apple and CEO Tim Cook, has paid off handsomely for Buffett, who said in 2022 that the cost of Berkshire’s Apple stake was only $31 billion. His firm is up almost 620% on its investment since the start of 2016.
Despite being a self-described luddite, Buffett has long had a coherent non-techie thesis for loving Apple. He’s seen how devoted Apple users are to their devices, and has viewed the iPhone as an extraordinary product that could keep its customers spending inside the Apple ecosystem. He calls it a moat, one of his favorite words for describing his preferred businesses.
“Apple has a position with consumers that they’re paying $1,500 or whatever it may be for a phone, and these same people pay $35,000 for a second car,” Buffett said at last year’s meeting. “And if they had to give up their second car or give up their iPhone, they’d give up their second car!”
Data is in his favor. According to a study from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, Apple has 94% customer loyalty, meaning that nine out of 10 current U.S. iPhone owners choose another iPhone when buying a new device.
Buffett has also hailed Apple’s ability to return billions of dollars to shareholders annually through share buybacks and dividends, a capital allocation strategy for which Buffett may have himself to thank. When asked in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post who he turns to for advice at pivotal moments, Cook offered up a story about his relationship with Buffett.
“When I was going through [the question of] what should we do on returning cash to shareholders, I thought who could really give us great advice here? Who wouldn’t have a bias?” Cook said. “So I called up Warren Buffett. I thought he’s the natural person.”
Apple has shown its appreciation for the Oracle of Omaha in other ways.
In 2019, the company published an original iPhone game called “Warren Buffett’s Paper Wizard” in which a paperboy bikes from Omaha to Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, California.
But with Apple’s business having declined in size in five of the past six quarters and with the company expecting just low-single digit growth in the current quarter, Buffett may face questions this weekend about whether he still sees the same power in the moat, particularly with regulatory pressures building around tech’s megacap companies.
Buffett trimmed his stake in Apple late year, though only by about 1%. Even after Friday’s rally, the stock is down 3.8% in 2024, while the S&P 500 is up 7.5%.
‘Very, very, very locked in’
Berkshire’s initial foray into Apple in 2016 was not Buffett’s idea. Rather, the investment was led by Ted Weschler, one of Buffett’s top deputies, and was seen as a passing of the torch to the next generation of Berskhire investment mangers.
But the following year, Berkshire started purchasing even more Apple, and Buffett began talking it up. He said he liked the stock and the company’s “sticky” product, although he didn’t use it.
In 2018, he said Apple users are “very, very, very locked in, at least psychologically and mentally” to the product and the ecosystem.
“Apple has an extraordinary consumer franchise,” he said.
At last year’s annual meeting, when asked how Berkshire can defend having Apple make up so much of its public portfolio, Buffett said, “It just happens to be a better business than any we own.” He also hailed Cook, calling him one of the “best managers in the world.”
A number Apple likes to use to tout the health of its business, despite the declining revenue, is 2.2 billion. That’s how many devices the company says are currently in use and points to the massive customer base available as Apple rolls out new subscription services.
“Once customers get into the ecosystem, they don’t leave. So it’s not a a speculative tech play,” said Dan Eye, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group, which owns Apple shares. “It’s kind of more like an annuity and I think that’s what Warren Buffett really sees as well.”
In addition to the drop in revenue, Apple faces new challenges from regulations and weak overseas markets, as well as from Microsoft and Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence. For regulators, the concern surrounds the very moat that Buffett finds so attractive, and whether its give the company monopolistic control in the smartphone market.
The U.S. government in March alleged that Apple designs its business to keep customers locked in. The Justice Department’s lawsuit claimed that products like Apple Card, the Apple Arcade game subscription, iMessage, and Apple Watch work best or only with an iPhone, creating illegal barriers to competition and making it harder for consumers to switch when it’s time for an upgrade.
However, the litigation is expected to take years, pushing any potential penalties to Apple and its products well into the future. In the meantime, there’s no sign that the iPhone is becoming less important as new devices like virtual reality goggles have found only niche audiences, while consumer AI products have failed to take off.
Buffett hasn’t voiced his view publicly on Apple’s regulatory hurdles, and this will be the first opportunity for investors to ask him about the issue since the DOJ’s lawsuit. But Buffett knows a little something about regulation — two markets where he’s most active are railroads and insurance.
In a note to clients earlier this month, Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi didn’t go deep on regulatory concerns, but mentioned that he doesn’t believe the DOJ suit will “seriously threaten” the strength of Apple’s ecosystem. He also said that following Buffett’s lead on getting in and out of Apple is a solid strategy for making money.
“Despite his reputation as a long term buy and hold investor, Warren Buffett has been remarkably disciplined at adding to his Apple position when it is relatively cheap and trimming when it is relatively expensive,” Sacconaghi wrote. He encouraged investors to “be like Buffett.”
More money back
Odds are that Buffett was thrilled with Apple’s announcement this week regarding its expanded repurchase program. It’s a practice he’s long adored.
“When I buy Apple, I know that Apple is going to repurchase a lot of shares,” he said in 2018.
And he likes to note how buybacks result in getting a bigger stake in the company without buying more shares.
“The math of repurchases grinds away slowly, but can be powerful over time,” Buffett said in 2021.
Apple also increased its dividend by 4%, and signaled that it would continue to lift it annually.
Buffett was effusive about Apple’s capital return strategy at the company’s annual meeting last year, pointing out that it helped Berkshire own a bigger piece of the pie. Unlike insurance company Geico and homebuilder Clayton Homes, which his firm owns in their entirety, Berkshire can continue to increase its stake in Apple, a fact he reminded investors of at the meeting.
“The good thing about Apple is that we can go up,” Buffett said.
WATCH: Warren Buffett’s stake in Japanese trading houses helps them focus on capital efficiency
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 17, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is sounding a familiar tune when it comes to artificial intelligence: better to invest too much than too little.
On his company’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg addressed Meta’s hefty spending this year, most notably its $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI as part of a plan to overhaul the AI unit, now known as Superintelligence Labs.
Some skeptics worry that the spending from Meta and its competitors in AI, namely OpenAI, is fueling a bubble.
For Meta’s newly formed group to have enough computing power to pursue cutting-edge AI models, the company has been building out massive data centers and signing cloud-computing deals with companies like Oracle, Google and CoreWeave.
Zuckerberg said the company is seeing a “pattern” and that it looks like Meta will need even more power than what was originally estimated. Over time, he said, those growing AI investments will eventually pay off in a big way.
“Being able to make a significantly larger investment here is very likely to be a profitable thing over, over some period,” Zuckerberg said on the call.
If Meta overspends on AI-related computing resources, Zuckerberg said, the company can repurpose the capacity and improve its core recommendation systems “in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.”
Along with its rivals, Meta boosted its expectations for capital expenditures.
Capex this year will now be between $70 billion and $72 billion, compared to prior guidance of $66 billion to $72 billion, the company said.
Meanwhile, Alphabet on Wednesday increased its range for capital expenditures to $91 billion to $93 billion, up from a previous target of $75 billion to $85 billion. And on Microsoft’s earnings call after the bell, the software company said it now expects capex growth to accelerate in 2026 after previously projecting slowing expansion.
Alphabet was the only one of the three to see its stock pop, as the shares jumped 6% in extended trading. Meta shares fell about 8%, and Microsoft dipped more than 3%.
Zuckerberg floated the idea that if Meta ends up with excess computing power, it could offer some to third parties. But he said that isn’t yet an issue.
“Obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option,” Zuckerberg said.
In the “very worst case,” Zuckerberg said, Meta ends up with several years worth of excess data center capacity. That would result in a “loss and depreciation” of certain assets, but the company would “grow into that and use it over time,” he said.
As it stands today, Meta’s advertising business continues to grow at a healthy pace thanks in part to its AI investments.
“We’re seeing the returns in the core business that’s giving us a lot of confidence that we should be investing a lot more, and we want to make sure that we’re not under investing,” Zuckerberg said.
Revenue in the third quarter rose 26% from a year earlier to $51.24 billion, topping analyst estimates of $49.41 billion and representing the company’s fastest growth rate since the first quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Meta reports Q3 earnings beat, company takes one-time tax charge.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google parent Alphabet is planning a “significant increase” in spend next year as it continues to invest in AI infrastructure to meet the demand of its customer backlog, executives said Wednesday.
The company reported its first $100 billion revenue quarter on Wednesday, beating Wall Street’s expectations for Alphabet’s third quarter. Executives then said that the company plans to grow its capital spend for this year.
“With the growth across our business and demand from Cloud customers, we now expect 2025 capital expenditures to be in a range of $91 billion to $93 billion,” the company said in its earnings report.
It marks the second time the company increased its capital expenditure this year. In July, the company increased its expectation from $75 billion to $85 billion, most of which goes toward investments in projects like new data centers.
There’ll be even more spend in 2026, executives said Wednesday.
“Looking out to 2026, we expect a significant increase in CapEx and will provide more detail on our fourth quarter earnings call,” said Anat Ashkenazi, Alphabet’s finance chief.
The latest increases come as companies across the industry race to build more infrastructure to keep up with billions in customer demand for the compute necessary to power AI services. Also on Wednesday, Meta raised the low end of its guidance for 2025 capital expenditures by $4 billion, saying it expects that figure to come in between $70 billion and $72 billion. That figure was previously $66 billion to $72 billion.
Google executives explained that they’re racing to meet demand for cloud services, which saw a 46% quarter-over-quarter growth to the backlog in the third quarter.
“We continue to drive strong growth in new businesses,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “Google Cloud accelerated, ending the quarter with $155 billion in backlog.”
The company reported 32% cloud revenue growth from the year prior and is keeping pace with its megacap competitors. Pichai and Ashkenazi said the company has received more $1 billion deals in the last nine months than it had in the past two years combined.
In August, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Anthropic last week announced a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to 1 million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs. The deal is worth tens of billions of dollars.
The spend on infrastructure is also helping the company improve its own AI products, executives said on the call.
Google’s flagship AI app Gemini now has more than 650 million monthly active users. That’s up from the 450 million active users Pichai reported the previous quarter.
Search also improved thanks to AI advancements, executives said. Google’s search business generated $56.56 billion in revenue — up 15% from the prior year, tempering fears that the competitive AI landscape may be cannibalizing the company’s core search and ads business.
AI Mode, Google’s AI product that lays within its search engine, has 75 million daily active users in the U.S., and those search queries doubled over the third quarter, executives said. They also reiterated that the company is testing ads in that AI Mode product.
WATCH: Google catching up with Meta pulled on shares following earnings, says D.A. Davidson’s Gil Luria
Technology
ServiceNow CEO denies AI companies are threatening enterprise software: ‘They don’t do what we do’
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott pushed back against the idea that artificial intelligence technology will make enterprise software redundant in a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“We realize the world needs access to the great hyperscalers, and so we integrated with all three of them. So that’s a cooperative,” McDermott said. “The world’s going to benefit from the large language model providers, but they don’t do what we do.”
As AI continues to develop, some on Wall Street are worried that companies will be able to rely solely on automated models — making many enterprise software companies’ products obsolete.
ServiceNow makes software for companies including the National Hockey League, FedEx, Ulta Beauty and AstraZeneca.
McDermott detailed some of the functions of ServiceNow’s platform, including management of assets, operations and security.
ServiceNow’s software is needed to perform complex functions — such as regulatory environment processes for financial services firms with decades-old legacy technology — McDermott suggested. He brushed off specific concerns that systems of record, which store data and information, might be “eaten by AI.”
He indicated that agentic AI isn’t up to the task of entering the “already complex environment.”
“Those agents are being sold into silos, and that’s the very reason why AI won’t work,” McDermott said. “AI is a cross-functional sport.”
McDermott also explained why ServiceNow proposed a five-for-one stock split on Wednesday during earnings.
“I feel strongly that we’re right now ready for more than just institutional investors,” he said. “We know the consumer investor wants in, and I don’t want you to have to buy fractional shares and go through all that.”
ServiceNow topped expectations when it reported after close, and shares jumped more than 4% in extended trading.
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