Apple remains Buffett's biggest public stock holding, but his thesis about its moat faces questions

Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett was still using a flip phone as late as 2020, four years after his investment behemoth started amassing a huge stake in the company that makes iPhones.

"I don't understand the phone at all, but I do understand consumer behavior," Buffett said last year at Berkshire's annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.

He's emerged in recent years as one of Apple's top evangelists.

At the end of 2023, Berkshire owned about 6% of Apple, a stake worth $174 billion at the time, or about 40% of the conglomerate's total value. That's about four times bigger than Berkshire's second-biggest public stock holding, Bank of America, and makes the company the No. 2 Apple shareholder, behind only Vanguard.

As Berkshire investors and fanboys of the 93-year-old Buffett flood Omaha this weekend for the 2024 annual meeting, Apple is likely to be a hot topic of discussion. The tech giant on Thursday reported a 10% year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, leading to a 4% drop in total revenue. But the stock had its best day since late 2022 on Friday due largely to a $110 billion stock buyback plan and increased margins that result from a growing services business.

The bet on Apple and CEO Tim Cook has paid off handsomely for Buffett, who said in 2022 that the cost of Berkshire's Apple stake was only $31 billion. His firm is up almost 620% on its investment since the start of 2016.

Despite being a self-described Luddite, Buffett has long had a coherent non-techie thesis for loving Apple. He's seen how devoted Apple users are to their devices, and has viewed the iPhone as an extraordinary product that could keep its customers spending inside the Apple ecosystem. He calls it a moat, one of his favorite words for