Warren Buffett Wasn’t the Only Billionaire Buying Alphabet Stock in Q2

Warren Buffett Wasn’t the Only Billionaire Buying Alphabet Stock in Q2

Rich Duprey

Sat, August 15, 2026 at 7:25 PM GMT+3 5 min read

• GOOG -0.12%

Quick Read

• Berkshire added 48 million Alphabet shares in Q2, an 83% increase making it their third-largest holding worth $37.8 billion.

• Druckenmiller independently initiated a new Alphabet position while boosting Amazon by over 1,000% and nearly tripling his United Airlines stake.

• Both investors independently bought Alphabet, Delta Air Lines, and D.R. Horton in the same quarter, a rare convergence that brought together two contrasting investment styles.

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Earnings season doubles as confession season on Wall Street. Every August, the biggest money managers in the world file their 13Fs with the SEC, and for a few days investors get an unusually clear window into what smart money actually did with its cash last quarter -- not what it said on CNBC.

This year's filings landed with a theme: Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL). Two of the most closely watched billionaire investors in the country, working independently and managing very different pools of capital, both used the second quarter to build up meaningful stakes in Google's parent company. One of them is a name every retail investor already knows. The other should be.

Berkshire Just Made Alphabet Its Third-Favorite Stock

Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE:BRK-A)(NYSE:BRK-B) Q2 13F showed the company added roughly 48 million Alphabet shares, an 83% increase that pushed its combined GOOGL/GOOG position to about 106 million shares worth $37.8 billion. That's now 10.2% of Berkshire's equity portfolio -- enough to make Alphabet the third-largest holding, trailing only Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) at $70 billion and American Express (NYSE:AXP) at $51.9 billion, and ahead of longtime staple Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO).

Roughly 60% of the added shares came from Berkshire's $10 billion private placement with Alphabet in June, earmarked to help fund AI infrastructure. The rest -- about $7 billion -- Berkshire bought on the open market.

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Buffett told CNBC in June that Alphabet was his idea, and that Berkshire began building the position back in the third quarter of 2025. He's since handed day-to-day stock-picking to CEO Greg Abel, but says the two still talk through where capital goes. In short, this wasn't Abel going rogue -- it carries Buffett's fingerprints, built on the kind of moat Buffett has always paid up for: a search business that still functions as a near-monopoly, a YouTube platform reaching 2.7 billion monthly users, and a cloud unit that's now the third-largest in the world behind AWS and Azure.

Druckenmiller Was Peering Over Buffett's Shoulder

Buffett is the investor small investors most often try to shadow, but Druckenmiller is the one other billionaires study. He ran George Soros's Quantum Fund through the trade that famously broke the Bank of England in 1992, then spent 30 years running his own Duquesne Capital Management without a single losing year before converting it into Duquesne Family Office in 2010 -- a private investment vehicle that manages Druckenmiller's own wealth rather than outside client money, which is why it can move fast and concentrate hard without redemption pressure.

That speed showed up in Duquesne's Q2 13F. The $5.21 billion portfolio initiated a brand-new Alphabet position, alongside new stakes in Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) and Fox (NASDAQ:FOX). Druckenmiller also increased his position in Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) by more than 1,000%, nearly tripled United Airlines (NASDAQ:UAL) holdings, and fully exited Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO), Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), and Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU).

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Two legends, one stock. When the world's most different investment philosophies align on a single trade, the market should take notice. © 24/7 Wall St.

When Two Legends Read From the Same Playbook

Granted, Druckenmiller is a sector rotator by nature -- he's just as likely to own a Brazil ETF or a biotech name as a mega-cap -- and this quarter was no exception. But buried in the reshuffling was a new 603,000-share position in Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) and a $48 million position in D.R. Horton (NYSE:DHI). Berkshire grew its airline position by 44% to 57.3 million shares and also bought a new stake in the homebuilder.

Two investors with almost nothing in common, philosophically, landed on the same two stocks and the same search giant in the same three months. That's not coincidence -- that's convergence, and convergence is worth noticing.

Key Takeaway

Neither filing is a reason to chase Alphabet blindly -- 13Fs are backward-looking, and both funds bought before some of the stock's recent run. Still, when Berkshire's 10.2%-of-portfolio conviction bet lines up with a brand-new position from one of the sharpest macro traders alive, that's two very different playbooks pointing at the same page.

Investors doing their own homework on Alphabet now have good company doing it alongside them.

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