Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway cut Apple investment by about 13% in the first quarter

Good morning and welcome to CNBC’s special coverage of the 2024 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting. I am Mike Santoli. Becky Quick is here with me as well. We are here in Omaha, NE on the floor of the exhibit hall where Berkshire companies are selling their wares to shareholders. Just a few yards from here inside the arena, shareholders are taking their seats ahead of Warren Buffett taking the stage. We are expecting some big names sort of in the circle of Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett. You see, Apple CEO Tim Cook has arrived. He is here. We also believe City CEO Jane Frazier is here as of course is Bill Gates, who is a regular. Becky has arrived. I’m sorry, I was just running back from the floor. Tim Cook is here and we’ve been going through the earnings and reading through and there’s some pretty significant news that was revealed in this 10 Q today going through the numbers checking out. I know we’re going to go more in depth on some of the top line numbers, but one of the big stories is, I’m really sorry, I ran really fast. One of the big stories is that Berkshire has trimmed its holdings of Apple. Apple is by far Berkshire’s largest holding. Berkshire is Apple’s largest shareholder, but they trimmed about 13% of their holdings in the first quarter. That’s more than $20 billion. We don’t know the sales price or it’s around $20 billion, I should say. We don’t know the price they sold, but it’s some big numbers. We’re going to run through those numbers. And I just finished talking to Tim Cook about it. He did know that this was coming. He talked to Warren about it yesterday. Warren, Warren Buffett. He said that they had a long conversation with it. He says pointed out that they’re still a very large shareholder, their largest more than 5% and that Apple is still by far Berkshire’s largest. Holding said he feels good about it and he says it is a privilege to have them as a shareholder. So that’s the comment from from Tim Cook coming off of this. He knew this was coming, already had spoken a warrant about it and said that this is a privilege to have Berkshire as a shareholder. Yeah. And. And it remains so it’s still about 40% of Berkshire’s portfolio is in Apple shares, about 115,000,000 shares it seems were were sold in the course of the quarter. And of course, you know we were talking all day yesterday about this pop and Apple shares on its results, on its new buyback program. And all day we were trying to calculate what the Berkshire gained from the Apple shares were And of course it’s a little bit less than that. But it’s worth noting since the end of March when this this holding, we now have the updated holdings for for Berkshire Hathaway, the stock is up. I did note that in the first quarter Berkshires net sales approximated apples share buybacks over the quarter. So I was also saying yesterday, hey, apples buying back stock from everybody else but Berkshire raising their stake. Not quite the case, but again, Apple still seems more than 40% of Berkshire Holdings and Berkshire holder 5% portfolio. This is a massive, massive, massive portfolio. But Apple makes up the vast bulk of that portfolio and still does after these sales and it was up big last year Apple shares. So the way to think about it is if it’s dollar value, it it, it got pretty big. But we’ll be interested to hear perhaps if if Warren is is asked, yeah. And if he says much about, yeah, I mean it’s just a very interesting news. And again, it’s the news that we’ve been digging through for the last hour since this filing came out. There’s a lot more to look at it.