Berkshire Trolls The AI Bubble By Buying Macy's

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

For the better part of the last year, Wall Street has behaved like a teenager who just discovered Red Bull and leverage at the same time. Anything remotely tied to artificial intelligence has soared into the financial stratosphere.

Startups with no revenue, no profits, and occasionally no actual product are raising millions or billions because their founders can say the words “large language model”. Public company CEOs now jam “AI” into earnings calls with the same shamelessness that “trendy” gastropubs have when being the 4th “new” place on the block to not just offer a good ole’ fashioned cheeseburger, but the breathtaking innovation of a truffle aioli smashburger.

Meanwhile, looming over all of this market hysteria was Berkshire Hathaway and its absurd cash pile. More than $390 billion sitting on the sidelines while markets rocketed higher. The question became an obsession. What were Warren Buffett and his successor Greg Abel waiting for?

Surely this cash hoard was being preserved for some grand masterstroke. Maybe Berkshire would make a massive AI acquisition. Maybe it would take a huge stake in some futuristic robotics company whose product sounds vaguely dystopian. Maybe Buffett would emerge from Omaha wearing a black turtleneck and announce BerkshireGPT.

Nope. None of these. The filing arrived yesterday and Wall Street discovered that the answer was Macy’s: a company most people associate with buying last minute wedding gifts and wandering through perfume fog thick enough to qualify as weather.

In an era when investors are paying breathtaking multiples for companies promising that AI will revolutionize enterprise workflows, Berkshire appears to have strolled calmly into a department store hoping to get harassed by the Vancome lady.

It is notable to write about because it feels so aggressively out of sync with the cultural moment. Right now entire hedge funds are building...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE 100% FREE HERE).