Back in February, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway revealed that it sold 9.81 million shares of AAPL at the end of 2020. Speaking during the conglomerate’s annual shareholder meeting this weekend, however, Buffett acknowledged that this decision was “probably a mistake.”
In February, Buffett explained that Berkshire sold a small portion of its AAPL stake at the end of 2020, pocketing $11 billion. Because of Apple’s share buybacks, however, which reduce the total number of outstanding shares, Berkshire’s ownership of AAPL actually increased to 5.4% despite that sale. AAPL represents Berkshire’s biggest common stock investment.
Speaking this weekend, Buffett reiterated that he is still bullish on Apple.
“The brand and the product, it’s an incredible product. It’s a huge, huge bargain to people. I mean the part it plays in their lives is huge. I mean, I use it as a phone but I’m probably the only guy in the country.”
He also addressed his decision to sell those 9.81 million shares of AAPL last fall. Buffett explained that this decision was “probably a mistake,” and his Berkshire VP Charlie Munger told him just that:
“That was probably a mistake…Charlie in his usual low key way let me know he thought it was a mistake, too… It’s an extraordinary business… [Tim Cook] couldn’t do what Steve Jobs obviously could do in terms of creation, but Steve Jobs couldn’t do what Tim Cook has done in many respects.”
Munger also had some interesting comments on Robinhood, the popular investment app on iPhone:
“It’s just god awful that something like that would draw investment from civilized men and decent citizens. It’s deeply wrong. We don’t want to make our money selling things that are bad for people. But we’ve got the states doing it with the lottery…That’s one of the things that’s wrong with it. It’s getting respectable to do these things. The states are just as bad as Robinhood…The states in America replaced the mafia as the proprietor of the numbers game…They pushed the mafia aside and said, that’s our business, not yours. It doesn’t make me proud of my government.”
