At what was then the most unusual Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in the company’s history, in May 2020, Warren Buffett stood in front of an unusually small virtual audience—no CHI Health Center crowd, just cameras and a pandemic outside the windows—and said something that was widely quoted because it sounded definitive: Berkshire had sold its entire airline position, taking losses across American, Delta, United, and Southwest, and the future of the industry was too uncertain to hold.
“I don’t know that three, four years from now that the airline industry will fly as many passenger miles as it did last year,” he stated. In an impossible situation, that was a reasonable assessment. Since then, a lot has changed in the globe. It appears that Berkshire, which is currently led by Greg Abel, has had second thoughts regarding Delta.
In a regulatory statement covering Q1 2026 activities, which was the first complete quarter of portfolio management under Abel’s direction, the Berkshire Hathaway Delta investment—39.8 million shares, or a 6.1% ownership, purchased for about $2.65 billion—was revealed. With a current worth of more than $3 billion, the investment became the conglomerate’s 14th-largest holding as soon as it entered Berkshire’s books.
This is not an exploratory position that is only tentative. This commitment reveals something intentional about Abel’s perception of the airline sector as well as Berkshire’s six-year exit strategy, which involved selling Delta shares in the low twenties, well below their current value.
Berkshire’s return to the airline sector is a true departure from its previous one. In the years following the epidemic, Delta in particular has undergone more significant financial and strategic restructuring than its big U.S. competitors. Delta has increased first class capacity and positioned its product in ways that have drawn more affluent travelers and partially shielded income from the most price-sensitive market groups. The premium cabin expansion has been aggressive and successful.
Compared to nearly all other similar airline loyalty assets, the SkyMiles loyalty program has been more successfully monetized. The balance sheet has been fixed. These are not the same circumstances that existed when Berkshire sold in 2020, and they provide a plausible justification for why a return to the industry through this particular carrier at this time is not just a repeat of an earlier error under other circumstances.
However, it’s still unclear if this investment represents a more cyclical wager on sustained post-pandemic travel demand that may encounter different challenges as consumer spending patterns change, or if the airline industry’s structural features have actually changed in the ways that long-term Berkshire holders might want to believe.
Before the 2016 entry, Buffett was notoriously wary of the airline industry due to its continued capital-intensive nature, fuel sensitivity, and cyclical exposure. There’s a feeling that Abel’s return, at this size, in his first active quarter, is at least partially a statement about his own investment philosophy and his readiness to reconsider decisions that the previous Berkshire had considered resolved.
