Warren Buffett stepped down as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025 — having transformed a struggling textile firm into a $1.1 trillion conglomerate. Regulatory filings indicate the company had continued trimming its Apple stake while pursuing a new position in The New York Times during his final quarter at the helm. Greg Abel took over as chief executive on January 1 this year while Buffett remained chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

These quarterly stock portfolio filings don’t make clear whether Buffett made every move or whether one of Berkshire’s other investment managers were involved. He had typically handled any investments worth more than $1 billion as SEO. So it remains uncertain whether the Times investment was one of his bets.

What were Buffett’s last moves as CEO?

According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Berkshire sold 4% of its stake in Apple and 77% of its ​10 ​million shares in online retailer Amazon.com during Q4 2025. The iPhone maker remains its largest equity holding at $62 billion, despite heavy sales over the past three years. The company also picked up a share worth $351.7 million in the New York Times towards the ⁠end ​of 2025.

The quarterly update shows that Berkshire also increased its investment in Chevron just before President Donald Trump ordered the arrest of Venezuela’s president — picked up about 8 million shares to give it more than 130 million shares in the oil giant. The Omaha-based company also continued selling off roughly 50 million Bank of America shares. It still holds nearly 81 million shares of the bank that Buffett first started buying in 2011 while the bank was struggling with the effects of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Berkshire Hathaway re-entering news media segment?

The company has disclosed a new $350 million investment in the New York Times — five years after Warren Buffett sold off all of Berkshire Hathaway’s newspapers and predicted unending declines for most of the industry. He had concluded in 2020 that the industry was “toast”. But Buffett had opined that newspapers with a national brand such as the Times or Wall Street Journal could still do well.

“It’s a full circle moment for Berkshire Hathaway in reinvesting in news and a huge vote of confidence by Berkshire in the business strategy of the New York Times,” Tim Franklin — a professor and chair of local news at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism — told AP News.

He added that while the Times had its roots in the newspaper business, it was now a thriving digital business with popular games like Wordle, a well-known sports platform called The Athletic and more than 12 million digital subscribers. Franklin said maybe struggling local newspapers can draw some lessons from the “digital news powerhouse” the Times has become and find ways to offer online games and showcase the local sports coverage that readers can’t get elsewhere.