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In one weekend, Warren Buffett’s successor gives shareholders reason to believe he is a savvy dealmaker

Greg Abel spent the past year trying to reassure investors that Berkshire Hathaway BRK.A 0.29%increase; green up pointing triangle is still the willing and opportunistic dealmaker it had been under his predecessor, Warren Buffett.

He said the right things, but a prolonged slump in the company’s stock showed that shareholders wanted action. In one weekend in late May, they got it.

Abel, who succeeded Buffett as Berkshire’s chief executive officer in January, agreed over the weekend to pay $6.8 billion for the home builder Taylor Morrison Home TMHC -0.07%decrease; red down pointing triangle while also in pursuit of a second multibillion-dollar transaction. On Monday, he delivered his encore: a $10 billion purchase of shares in Alphabet GOOGL -3.86%decrease; red down pointing triangle, Google’s parent company.

“He’s unbelievably efficient, and that’s probably dramatized by the fact that I’m slow and inefficient,” Buffett said of his successor, in an interview. “Even in my prime, I did not get as much accomplished in a day as Greg does.”

The deals rank among the biggest Berkshire has pursued in recent years and reveal how Abel is willing to borrow from Buffett’s successful playbook while putting his own stamp on how to organize Berkshire.

“It signals to the market that Greg Abel is—no pun intended—ready, willing and able to allocate capital to deals and not afraid to venture into an out-of-favor industry in keeping with the Berkshire MO,” said Cathy Seifert, an analyst at CFRA Research.

Since Buffett announced plans in May 2025 to cede his CEO title at year-end, Abel has been working to persuade Berkshire’s shareholders that he would maintain what has made the company such an unusual fixture among U.S. corporations: a conglomerate of unrelated businesses from railroads to energy to children’s toys, a dominant insurance arm and a sizable portfolio managed by the CEO.

The new CEO came into the role as an operational maestro who would bring a critical eye to that vast portfolio of businesses. His skills as a dealmaker and stock picker weren’t as well-defined. Some investors weren’t quite sure whether Abel had the chops to execute big deals as Buffett had. That helps explain why Berkshire’s Class A shares have dropped by more than 6% in the past year. And so far in 2026, the stock is underperforming the S&P 500 by the widest margin since 1990, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

A sticking point for investors: Would Abel start to put some of Berkshire’s trove of cash to work? At Berkshire’s annual meeting in May, Abel told shareholders he had a shortlist of companies he was interested in buying, at the right price. He has also restarted a stock-buyback program that had been idle since 2024 and bought a stake in an insurer in Japan that deepened Berkshire’s interests there.

While neither deal will make much of a dent in Berkshire’s cash pile, which had reached more than $380 billion at the end of March, each represents a different flavor of the kinds of deals that built Berkshire in the first place.

Taylor Morrison is a stalwart in an out-of-favor industry battered by high mortgage rates and expensive housing prices—the kind of company that Buffett eagerly snapped up for decades. Indeed, Abel’s statement on the deal—“homeownership remains central to the American dream, and this investment expands our ability to serve that market”—appeared to echo his predecessor’s words in October 2008, when the financial world was reeling from the worst credit crisis in decades.

“In the near term, unemployment will rise, business activity will falter and headlines will continue to be scary,” Buffett wrote then in a New York Times opinion column. “So…I’ve been buying American stocks.”

Berkshire added Alphabet to its portfolio during the third quarter of last year. While Apple remains the single-biggest holding in Berkshire’s stock portfolio, the conglomerate had been underweight in technology.

Abel spoke with Goldman Sachs, Alphabet’s banker, on Sunday to work out the terms of Berkshire’s participation in the company’s stock offerings and later connected with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and finalized the deal Monday, people familiar with the matter said. Berkshire is getting those shares at a steep discount to where they trade.

Henry Asher, president of the Northstar Group, which owns shares of Berkshire, said he is looking past the stock’s declines and hopes Abel will continue making deals.

“If that’s misery, we’ll take more,” said Asher. “I hope that this is accompanied by significant buybacks of their own stock at these levels.”

In a departure from some of Berkshire’s past acquisitions, Abel said in a statement that he expects to “unify our site-built home-building operations into a combined platform,” referring to Taylor Morrison and Clayton Homes, a Berkshire-owned maker of manufactured houses.

Buffett in the past gave the businesses Berkshire acquired autonomy from one another, even in cases in which one or more operated in the same industry. Abel’s plan for the housing group, said Berkshire analysts and watchers, is a signal that the new CEO is beginning to put his own stamp on the conglomerate.

Leading up to Abel’s succession, Berkshire had made moves to align related subsidiaries in its far-flung portfolio, last year bringing Helzberg Diamonds and Ben Bridge Jeweler under one chief executive. In December, Berkshire appointed a new president of consumer products, service and retailing businesses.

“In some respects, it flies in the face of the Berkshire model,” said Seifert. “It’s worth watching to see if Greg tweaks that model a little.”