Vetted by NeuralPress's Multi-Agent Verifier for strict factual validity and event relevance. Our compliance engine cross-checks and filters search results to ensure zero false correlations or misleading content.
Apple Investment Growth
Comparison of initial investment vs current value (pre-tax)
Primary Sources
Warren Buffett Shouts Out Tim Cook in Surprise Speech at Berkshire Bash ...
Warren Buffett is the chairman and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage via Getty Images 2026-05-02T14:59:20.131Z Warren Buffett thanked Tim Cook for making Apple such a stellar investment for Berkshire Hathaway. The investor unexpectedly invited the Apple CEO to take a bow during Berkshire's annual meeting. While Berkshire has pared its Apple bet, he said that Cook grew their investment to $185 billion. Warren Buffett trumpeted his Apple bet and invited outgoing CEO Tim Cook to take a bow during Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting on Saturday. Greg Abel, who succeeded Buffett as Berkshire's CEO at the start of this year, unexpectedly announced that the legendary investor and chairman would say a few words.Buffett — sitting in the front row and fully embracing his retired status by wearing a sweater instead of his usual suit — began by saying the transition to Abel's leadership had been "100% successful" with Berkshire's new boss "doing everything I did and then some" and "doing it better than I did."The business icon, 95, then recalled his decision to turn over 10% of Berkshire's resources to a person "not that well known at the time." He was referring to Berkshire's roughly $35 billion investment in Apple between 2016 and 2018, and the tech giant's CEO, Cook, who announced he would step down earlier in April.Business Insider's Theron Mohamed was watching from the press box of the CHI Health Center in Buffett's hometown of Omaha as the famous stockpicker spoke.Buffett drew chuckles from the crowd when he joked that Berkshire had turned over management of the money to Apple to make itself "look good," and that was its "preferred way of operating."He then underscored that Apple has turned that $35 billion, including dividends and both realized and unrealized appreciation, into $185 billion before tax."And I didn't have to do a damn thing," he quipped.Apple remains Berkshire's largest position, despite the company selling the majority of its stake over the past few years.Buffett then reflected on Apple celebrating its 50th anniversary in recent weeks. He said that Cook "succeeded a legend" when he took over as CEO from visionary cofounder Steve Jobs in late 2011, and that only a "very few percentage points of American investors had even heard" of the new boss."When we made our investment and turned over 10% of the resources of Berkshire, we were turning it over for Tim, and I say he's turned that into $185 billion or something...
Before Berkshire's big meeting on Saturday, revisit 60 years of Warren ...
This Saturday, Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will descend upon Omaha for the company’s annual meeting, just as they have for over 60 years. But for the first time ever, they’ll be doing so without Warren Buffett sitting in as company CEO. Though Buffett, 95, will still be in attendance this year, he’s not set to speak, according to the meeting schedule. And yet, though he’ll be less hands-on this year, Buffett is still chairman of Berkshire’s board of directors and remains the company’s largest shareholder, holding about 30% of the voting interest and 13.7% of the economic interest. Every year between 1965 and 2024, Buffett wrote a letter to shareholders ahead of the annual “Woodstock for capitalists.” Here are some of the Oracle of Omaha’s best reflections from his annual letters: The best holding period? Forever Coca-Cola and Apple rank among Berkshire’s most successful investments, but when Buffett started to buy Coke shares in the 1980s, the choice wasn’t so obvious. “We made major purchases of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Pfd. (Freddie Mac) and Coca-Cola. We expect to hold these securities for a long time. In fact, when we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever,” Buffett wrote in his 1989 letter. In the years after that letter, Berkshire bought 400 million shares of Coca-Cola stock, spending about $1.3 billion in total. Now, the company owns 9.3% of Coca-Cola, worth more than $31 billion. Don’t be a duck In 1998, Buffett warned against overstating your impact. “In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond,” he wrote. “So what’s our duck rating for 1997? The table on the facing page shows that though we paddled furiously last year, passive ducks that simply invested in the S&P Index rose almost as fast as we did.” Where we went wrong in 2008 In 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, Buffett shared one place he thought Wall Street went wrong. “When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s. But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary,” he said. He added tha...
Greg Abel takes stage at Berkshire's first annual meeting, with Buffett ...
[1/2]Shareholders line up to attend the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. annual shareholders' meeting, the conglomerate's first since Warren Buffett stepped down after 60 years as chief executive and was ...
2026 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting
Warren Buffett has loomed large at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meetings, and this will be a key challenge as new CEO Greg Abel takes center stage.
