Gates-Backed Cascade Sees Opportunity in Republic Services That Half of Wall Street Misses

Trey Thoelcke

Mon, August 24, 2026 at 3:05 PM GMT+3 4 min read

RSG +0.53%

Quick Read

Cascade Investment accumulated RSG shares in a price range from $214 to $217 across four straight sessions, leveraging its 10% ownership stake and board-level insight into the waste hauler.
Republic Services runs 32% EBITDA margins, raised its quarterly dividend to $0.67, and grew free cash flow 17%, all of which fits Larson's low-volatility compounder playbook.
Wall Street's Hold count matches its Buy count on RSG, and retail buyers today enter above Cascade's cost basis, sacrificing the margin of safety Larson insisted on.
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Cascade Investment, the private holding company that manages Bill Gates's personal fortune under longtime lieutenant Michael Larson, disclosed sustained accumulation of Republic Services (NYSE:RSG) common stock across four consecutive trading sessions, according to Form 4s signed by Alan Heuberger as attorney-in-fact for Michael Larson, business manager, and for William H. Gates III. The filings list Cascade as a 10% owner of the waste hauler. The buying pattern is unusually dense: multiple daily purchases stacked into periods of price weakness.

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What Cascade Actually Bought

The Form 4s show Cascade adding shares at prices roughly in the $213.70 to $217.18 area, with several trades reported as weighted-average fills. Representative acquisitions include 157,096 shares at $215.6991 and 31,364 shares at $216.378 on Aug. 13; 211,771 shares at $216.3966 on Aug. 11; and 166,095 shares at $215.0725 plus 88,102 at $214.4323 on Aug. 10. The purchases are attributed to Cascade Investment rather than to Gates personally directing trades. Note that Larson also sits on Republic's board, so this is an insider vehicle whose principal has a director-level view of Republic's operating cadence.

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Reading the Thesis From the Numbers

Republic's fundamentals support a pricing-over-volume thesis that Cascade appears to be underwriting. On the Q2 2026 call, CEO Jon Vander Ark said, "We're always going to take price over volume, and we're going to continue to get a fair return on the hard work that our people do and the assets we invest." Core price on total revenue ran 5.3% and adjusted EBITDA margin held at 32.1%. Management raised full-year guidance to $17.2 billion to $17.3 billion in revenue and $7.23 to $7.28 in adjusted EPS. Free cash flow is compounding: $2.43 billion in 2025, up 16.9%. The dividend was just lifted from $0.625 to $0.67 quarterly. Republic runs at a beta of 0.396, precisely the low-volatility compounder profile Larson has historically favored.

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Wall Street Split on the Name

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The consensus is genuinely split, with the analyst Hold count matching the Buy count, an unusual configuration for a stock Cascade is aggressively accumulating. The consensus target price is $245.92, and the stock closed the most recent session at $220.67. That is up 4.1% year to date but down 6.3% over one year. It has returned 80.7% over five years and 336.5% over a decade. The 52-week range is $196.41 to $235.98. The market cap sits near $67.6 billion at a trailing P/E of 31.

Should Retirement-Focused Investors Follow?

Two facts should govern the decision. First, at $220.67, retail buyers today pay above Cascade's $213.70 to $217.18 fill window. Cascade secured a better cost basis. Second, the professional community is meaningfully split: the Hold camp is as large as the Buy camp. Our own model rates Republic a Buy with a 12-month target of $264.15, implying 19.7% upside at 0.9 confidence, citing lower volatility and infrastructure exposure.

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The thesis for a retirement portfolio is coherent: a pricing-disciplined operator with 32%-plus EBITDA margins, a rising dividend, and an insider-adjacent 10% owner adding size (the kind of income-first setup we walked through in a free dividend ladder guide here: Never Touch the Principal). The caveat is the entry price. Following Cascade is defensible for long-horizon capital that treats the dividend as the base return, but chasing shares above $220 sacrifices the margin of safety Larson insisted on.