Berkshire Hathaway Spent Nearly Ten Billion Dollars Buying Back Its Stock but Few Expected What Happened to Profits

Warren Buffett once refused to buy back a single share of his company's stock.

His handpicked successor just spent nearly ten billion dollars doing exactly that.

Greg Abel is betting big but everyone is wondering about the impact on Berkshire's profits.

GEICO Is Losing Ground While BNSF Picks Up the Slack

GEICO burned 76.6 cents of every premium dollar on claims in the third quarter, up from 71.5 cents a year earlier.

GEICO is dealing with more wrecks, pricier repair bills, and a lower average premium at the same time, a combination that is squeezing the insurer Buffett has been tied to since the 1950s.

Underwriting profit across Berkshire's insurance arm fell 43 percent to 1.35 billion dollars.

BNSF, the railroad Buffett bought outright in 2010, is the bright spot, posting a 19 percent earnings jump to 1.73 billion dollars as shipping volume climbed.

Berkshire's manufacturing, service, and retail operations added a 12 percent earnings gain, with industrial products doing the heavy lifting.

Returns on the hundreds of billions Berkshire parks in Treasury bills slipped too, as falling short-term interest rates dragged insurance investment income down 14 percent.

Buffett Paused Buybacks for a Year and a Half, Abel Just Doubled Them

Earlier in 2026, in his first annual letter as Berkshire's chief executive, Abel went a full year and a half without buying back a single share.

He told shareholders that sitting on 373 billion dollars in cash was not "a retreat from investing," even as analysts at Keefe, Bruyette and Woods rated the stock underperform and cut their earnings forecast.

Abel wrote, "We will assess value carefully, act patiently, and hold for the long term – preferably forever."

Months later, he spent 9.6 billion dollars buying back Berkshire stock in the third quarter alone, more than double what he spent the quarter before.

He paid an average of about 500 dollars for each Class B share repurchased, a class that closed out the week at 570.89 dollars.

Abel Just Told Wall Street What Buffett Always Believed

Operating earnings fell 5.8 percent to 12.7 billion dollars, and net earnings fell further still, down 28 percent to 22.1 billion dollars, mostly because Berkshire's stock portfolio posted smaller paper gains than it did a year earlier, the exact kind of quarter-to-quarter swing Buffett always said was close to meaningless.

Cash still sits at 352.3 billion dollars, enough to buy almost any company in America outright and still have money left over.

Abel is not hoarding that cash out of fear.

He is refusing to overpay for anything just because Wall Street wants him to do something with it.

That is the same discipline that kept Berkshire out of the dot-com crash and out of the 2008 banks that needed bailouts, and it is why investors who trust this company do not panic when one quarter's insurance numbers go sideways.

Every share Abel retires increases what is left for everyone still holding on, math Buffett preached for six decades.

Wall Street wanted a big acquisition or a dividend announcement to prove Abel could fill Buffett's chair.

Instead he did the boring thing that actually works, he waited a year and a half for the price to make sense, and then he moved.

Sources:

• Berkshire Hathaway, third quarter 2026 earnings release, November 2026.
• Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel's first annual shareholder letter, 2026.
• Associated Press, "Berkshire Hathaway Buys Back 9.6 Billion of Its Own Stock but Its Profits Declined," NY1, November 7, 2026.
• Stock Analysis, "Berkshire's Q3 Operating Earnings Fall 5.8 Percent as Buybacks Increase," Stock Analysis, November 2026.