Author: Le Ming
May 2, 2026, Omaha. This time, only a little over half of the 18,000 seats were filled—in the past, tickets for Berkshire's shareholder meeting were fought over and hotels outside the venue were hard to get.
This time, the 95-year-old Buffett was not hosting on stage as he did in previous years. The new CEO, Greg Abel, stood in front of the main screen, answering investors' grilling questions about why Berkshire Hathaway was sitting on nearly $400 billion in cash.
During the same week, six thousand miles away in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son's team was doing another thing: packaging SoftBank Group's unprofitable AI assets, preparing to place them into a new company called Roze AI, targeting a valuation of $100 billion and planning an IPO in the US in the second half of 2026.
The reason is simple: SoftBank must continue to find money and continue investing for OpenAI's $64.6 billion check, which may eventually roll close to $100 billion.
One holds $397.4 billion in cash, buying nothing, waiting for the market to crash; the other carries ¥16.34 trillion (over $100 billion) in parent company interest-bearing debt, betting the market won't crash.
Berkshire Hathaway: Too Much Money is a Problem
What is $397.4 billion?
It is equivalent to nearly 40% of Berkshire's total market value, and double its average cash level over the past twenty years.
Of this, $339.3 billion is directly held in U.S. short-term Treasuries, and Berkshire has also become one of the largest non-governmental creditors of the U.S. Treasury.
This pile of money wasn't accumulated passively; it was accumulated actively.
For the past fourteen quarters, Berkshire has been a net seller of stocks each quarter. Apple, once the top holding, was sold down for four consecutive quarters starting Q3 2024, accumulating sales of nearly 688 million shares, realizing over $100 billion.
Buffett's explanation has always been the same: can't find anything cheap.
He wrote a line in his 2024 shareholder letter: "Typically, nothing looks attractive." In a recent shareholder meeting offstage interview, he likened the current market to "a casino next to a church," saying that among all market sentiments he's experienced, this is the most like gambling.
The problem is, he's held this judgment for more than a year.
Berkshire's stock performance over the past twelve months has lagged the S&P 500 by about 40 percentage points. This is not a small number—it's one of the largest relative underperformances since Buffett took over Berkshire in 1965. The last time this degree of underperformance occurred was in the final stages of the 1999 dot-com bubble.
At that time, Buffett said he would only buy "bricks, carpets, insulation, and paint—those cutting-edge industries." Two years later, the Nasdaq fell 78%, and he was proven right.
But this time, investors have waited for more than two years. The market rises, Berkshire doesn't move; the market rises again, Berkshire still doesn't move. On January 1 of this year, when Buffett formally stepped down as CEO, Berkshire's stock price dipped slightly—the market expressed a restrained disappointment in the most restrained way.
This is the situation Abel inherited. He is a Canadian accountant who worked his way up to Berkshire vice-chairman, spending a lifetime in heavy-asset, regulated, slow-growth businesses like utilities, railroads, and energy.
He is not Buffett, he knows he is not Buffett. In his first shareholder letter, he repeatedly emphasized "continuity" and "decentralization." In his first shareholder meeting, his answer to all suggestions about breaking up the conglomerate was an absolute "impossible."
Abel's dilemma is: he can neither deploy this cash (because the market is too expensive) nor continue pretending the money doesn't exist (because investors are voting with their feet).
If the market keeps rising over the next five to ten years, he will eventually have to face a question never seriously discussed in Berkshire's history—give the money away. Either return it to shareholders as a special dividend or actually break up and sell the monster stitched together from over 60 subsidiaries.
Will Berkshire die? Not suddenly. Its holdings are too diversified, its cash too ample, its debt too low. Any external shock would have a hard time truly piercing it. But it will slowly, respectably, become something else.
SoftBank's Problem: Too Little Money but Must Keep Betting
Masayoshi Son's situation is the opposite mirror image of Abel's.
February 27, 2026, SoftBank released an announcement. The most critical sentence translates to: "SoftBank Group's cumulative investment in OpenAI is expected to reach $64.6 billion, representing approximately a 13% stake."
$64.6 billion, 13%. This is the most expensive single bet of this era.
To understand the madness of this number, one needs to see how SoftBank could afford this bet.
The parent company's interest-bearing debt has soared from ¥12.14 trillion in March 2025 to ¥16.34 trillion in December 2025. The parent company's so-called cash is only about ¥3.8 trillion, of which nearly one-third is actually unused committed credit lines, not real cash.
Where did this money come from? SoftBank took $20 billion out from pledging its Arm stock holdings; and raised about $7.7 billion from pledging shares of its Japanese telecom subsidiary SBKK.
On March 27, 2026, SoftBank also signed an unprecedented $40 billion bridge loan, led by five banks—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and MUFG—later expanded to 8. This is one of the largest bridge loans in Asian history. $30 billion of this money is directly used to follow-on invest in OpenAI. The term is 12 months, meaning by March 2027, SoftBank must repay $40 billion.
That's why Son has looked a bit 'not normal' this year: he cleared all SoftBank's Nvidia holdings, taking $5.8 billion out, a one-time clearance in October 2025. In a Tokyo speech in early December 2025, he admitted: "I didn't want to sell a single share of Nvidia, but I needed more money to invest in OpenAI. I cried selling Nvidia."
To raise money for OpenAI, Son has been "selling pots and pans": SoftBank sold its T-Mobile holdings—56.9 million shares in the first three quarters of FY2025, raising $12.7 billion; another 12.5 million shares in Q4, taking back another $2.3 billion. Deutsche Telekom was also cleared, Alibaba was also cleared. At the end of April this year, SoftBank began arranging a nearly $10 billion margin loan collateralized by OpenAI equity, with an interest rate as high as nearly 8%.
Simultaneously, SoftBank is issuing bonds everywhere: In November 2025, SoftBank issued a ¥500 billion bond with a 3.98% coupon; in April 2026, it followed with a ¥418 billion subordinated bond with a 4.97% coupon for the first five years—this is the most expensive retail bond in SoftBank's history and the highest coupon for a Japanese non-financial corporate yen retail bond ever—showing thatthe market has begun to 'doubt' SoftBank's debt.
The credit market's reaction was direct: SoftBank's 5-year credit default swap surged to 355 basis points in early March, an 11-month high.
Son's recent "lifeline" is hoping OpenAI can go public as soon as possible, otherwise debt pressure becoming long-term could truly blow up SoftBank.
However, although OpenAI CEO Sam Altman advocates for an IPO in Q4 2026, CFO Sarah Friar advocates postponing to 2027—CEO and CFO publicly split on this matter; this kind of news itself tells the market: the company internally is not sure if it's ready.
One Must Die
Berkshire's death is gentle.
It will not go bankrupt—its subsidiaries are all quality cash cows, its debt level is extremely low. Even if the AI capital expenditure bubble bursts, even if data center demand halves, even if the S&P 500 falls 50%, Berkshire's cash hoard is enough for it to devour anything cheap like a glutton for a decade.
Its death is the death of identity—Buffett's kind of "buying good businesses at cabbage prices" compounding myth may no longer hold true in a world where valuations are forever above 30 times P/E, in a world where the10-year Treasury yield shatters all traditional valuation models.
Abel may execute well in the posture of a "rational CEO"—continue operating, continue small buybacks, continue doing a little M&A at the edges—but Berkshire as a narrative of capitalist discipline died at the moment Buffett stopped writing letters. Its body remains, but its soul has left the stage.
SoftBank's death may be violent. Its death triggers are three; pulling any one may set off a chain reaction:
The first trigger is OpenAI. If its IPO is postponed to 2027 or even 2028, if Amazon's $35 billion commitment tied to the IPO ultimately fails to materialize, if OpenAI's revenue growth stops in a quarter—even just one quarter—the valuation of that 13% stake on SoftBank's balance sheet will be marked down.
The second trigger is Arm. Arm is currently SoftBank's only truly liquid asset that remains highly priced by the market—market cap around $200 billion, SoftBank holds 87%.
Arm's royalty revenue rose 26% year-over-year in Q3 FY2026, with data center-related royalties doubling; this is one of the pillars supporting SoftBank's entire valuation story.
But Arm is also the most easily re-priced target right now—once its current forward P/E of 70x returns to a 'normal' semiconductor company valuation, the coverage ratio for SoftBank's $20 billion Arm collateralized loans will collapse.
The third trigger is refinancing itself. The $40 billion bridge loan matures in March 2027. Before that, SoftBank must accomplish at least one of: OpenAI IPO, Roze AI IPO, sell another batch of assets, or issue a bond of similar size to roll it over.
But each path is more expensive than the previous year—SoftBank's retail bond coupon has already risen from 3.98% in 2025 to 4.97% in 2026.
The probability of each of these three triggers individually is not high—OpenAI will likely go public, Arm likely won't collapse immediately, credit markets likely won't shut their doors on SoftBank overnight. But they have a non-negligible characteristic: they are highly correlated, not three independent events.
If the bubble doesn't burst, Son will ultimately be deified: Roze AI lists at a $100 billion valuation, OpenAI smoothly IPOs, and at age 70, he will realize his spoken narrative ofASI (Artificial Superintelligence).
And Berkshire, under Abel's steady management, will be gently, continuously, irreversibly marginalized by the market—until one day, some successor has to do what Buffett refused to do his whole life
