By Andrew Bary

Alphabet shares are now cheaper than what Berkshire Hathaway paid early this month for $10 billion of the tech giant's stock.

On Monday, Alphabet's voting Class A shares were off 5.7% to $346.90 and nonvoting Class C shares $(GOOG)$ were down 5.8% to $346.33.

The selloff was spurred by the departure of Google DeepMind's John Jumper. Jumper, who is a senior research scientist and Nobel Prize winner, is joining AI start-up Anthropic. The move is considered a blow to Alphabet's AI initiatives.

Alphabet's $10 billion stock sale to Berkshire was part of its $85 billion equity raise, which also included a public equity offering and a public sale of mandatory convertible preferred stock.

Berkshire looked like it got a sweet deal -- a 6%-plus discount to Alphabet's market price. It paid $351.81 for $5 billion of Class A stock and $348.20 for $5 billion of the Class C shares.

Big equity offerings are normally priced at a discount to the market price to attract investors and offset any potential drop in the price caused by the issuance of new stock. But the Berkshire discount, negotiated by CEO Greg Abel, looked steeper than what was needed to sell the stock.

The buy stock added to Berkshire's already sizable Alphabet holding. Berkshire now owns about 86 million shares worth $30 billion, making it a top five equity holding for the conglomerate. The other top four are Apple, American Express, and Coca-Cola.

Berkshire's purchase generated mixed reviews. Some watchers liked the move, saying Berkshire was buying into a technology leader and putting to use some of the company's nearly $400 billion in cash. Others didn't arguing that Berkshire was late to the Alphabet party. Alphabet shares have doubled in the past year.

Berkshire's Class B shares were down 0.3% to $488 and are off about 3% this year, roughly 13 percentage points behind the S&P 500 index.

Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 22, 2026 15:22 ET (19:22 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.