Forget AI Stocks: The New Berkshire Hathaway Nearly Tripled Its Stake in a 175-Year-Old Newspaper

The post Forget AI Stocks: The New Berkshire Hathaway Nearly Tripled Its Stake in a 175-Year-Old Newspaper appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..

Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK.B) used its first full quarter under Greg Abel to nearly triple its position in New York Times (NYSE:NYT), adding roughly 199% to the Class A stake in the same quarter it tripled Alphabet and started a Delta Air Lines position. For a firm that mostly sat out media after the Washington Post era, that signals a meaningful redirection of cash, and no other major fund manager carries the Times as a conviction buy.

What Abel actually bought

The Times is an unusual Berkshire holding. It is a $11.7 billion market cap publisher with a 175-year history, a dual-class capital structure, and an analyst target of $84.89 against a current price of $72.3. Mechanically, what Berkshire bought is a digital subscription business wearing a newspaper costume. Digital-only subscriptions hit $389.04 million in Q1 2026, up 16.1% year over year, on 13.08 million digital subscribers and ARPU of $9.77. Digital advertising grew 31.6%, the kind of acceleration normally reserved for AI darlings Abel was also buying. The print decline that bears keep pointing at is now small enough to ignore: print advertising fell 9.8% to $33.57 million, barely a rounding line in the model.

Inside that same Q1 filing, the valuation contrast is hard to miss. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) trades at roughly 11 times sales and a P/E of 28x on $422 billion in trailing revenue. Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) is the cyclical hedge, up 24% year to date. The Times is the slow-grower of the three, and trades at roughly 4 times sales, a level no AI-era media name comes near.

The thesis hiding in the financials

Berkshire’s playbook is paying for durable cash flow, and the Times now produces it. Full-year 2025 free cash flow grew 44.36% to $550.51 million. Moreover, its balance sheet carries $1.1 billion in cash and marketable securities with zero debt. This is the kind of structure Abel grew up with at Berkshire Energy.

Plus, management raised the quarterly dividend 27.8% to $0.23 per share and keeps repurchasing stock. It has $291.2 million remaining under authorization as of May 1, 2026.

The moat argument runs through bundling. The Times now sells games, recipes, The Athletic, Wirecutter, and audio as one product, and the financials show it working. CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said Q1 was “another great quarter, and our results reflect strong demand for the uncompromised journalism and premium lifestyle content that The Times is uniquely capable of delivering”. Guidance backs the language. The company expects digital-only subscription revenue up 14-17% and digital advertising up high-teens for Q2 2026. EPS keeps beating, with Q1 2026 coming in at $0.61 versus $0.47 expected. This is a 30.23% surprise and a fourth consecutive beat.

Should a retirement investor follow the trade

Start with valuation. NYT trades at a trailing P/E of 32x and forward P/E of 26x. That looks rich on a screen, but against a business compounding subscribers, ARPU, and margins simultaneously, it is reasonable. Second, entry timing favors the buyer. The stock sits below both its 50-day moving average of $77.83 and the consensus target, and its one-year gain of 36.82% lags GOOGL’s 112.95% by a wide margin.

Third, the risks are knowable. Generative AI litigation cost $4.2 million pre-tax in Q1, and the Ochs-Sulzberger family controls the vote through the dual-class structure. Insider selling has been steady, with Kopit Levien selling 51,949 shares at a weighted average $79.70 in March, though that reads as scheduled RSU monetization. For a retirement portfolio already heavy in AI winners, a low-beta (0.94) subscription compounder with a fortress balance sheet is the ballast Abel appears to be assembling.

The post Forget AI Stocks: The New Berkshire Hathaway Nearly Tripled Its Stake in a 175-Year-Old Newspaper appeared first on 24/7 Wall St..