At the start of the year, there was an uproar when the Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, announced his retirement. As he retired, all eyes were on his last investing strategies for the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio. As a renowned value investor, many people in the market follow his 48-stock portfolio. And one stock the value investor sold as he retired was Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Billionaires unload Amazon
There has been a lot of chatter around billionaires unloading Amazon stock for multiple reasons since Buffett’s exit. What interested me was the timing of two billionaire investors unloading Amazon stock.
First is the value investor Warren Buffett reducing his Amazon stock holdings by 77% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and exiting the stock altogether in the first quarter of 2026, according to its 13F Filings. While Buffett sold, active investor Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office bought shares of Amazon in the fourth quarter of 2025 and then sold 94% of them in the first quarter of 2026.
If we go around digging into why they sold Amazon shares, you can come up with many reasons. For value investors, a price-to-earnings multiple of 31.6 times for 31% net income growth might have seemed expensive in December 2025. Moreover, 95% of free cash flow going towards capital spending on artificial intelligence (AI) data centres might have seemed risky.
For an active investor, the dip in Amazon’s share price because of Berkshire Hathaway’s sell-off presented a buying opportunity followed by a sale in the first quarter as AI stocks fell.
While the two billionaires have been selling Amazon, other wealth managers such as David Tepper at Appaloosa Management, Bill Ackman at Pershing Square Capital Management, and Larry Robbins at Glenview Capital Management have been buying Amazon shares. That explains the sharp dips and rallies in Amazon’s share price in the six months from October 2025 to March 2026.
What have billionaires been buying
Berkshire Hathaway has been buying shares of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Duquesne Family Office has been buying several chip companies, with significant buying in STMicroelectronics. We get why Alphabet seemed like a better value stock than Amazon. Alphabet delivered similar 32% earnings growth at a P/E ratio of 21 times. It has market leadership in ad revenue, and search revenue continues to show strong double-digit growth. Even Google is investing a boatload of money in AI, but free cash flows are reasonably down 47%, unlike Amazon’s 95% dip.
Duquesne Family Office’s moves to chipmakers as chips enjoy short-term growth, as that is where all the AI capital spending is flowing.
Replicating billionaire buying on TSX stocks
If you were to replicate the investing logic of the two billionaires on the TSX, Celestica (TSX:CLS) presents a good opportunity. As an original design manufacturer having secured three hyperscaler clients, including Google, Celestica has a strong order book and significant potential for the next growth cycle. Now is a good time to buy the stock while it is still 27% below its June peak. It could surge another 50% or more in the third quarter as it executes its strong order book.
As for Alphabet (TSX:GOOG), you can buy this stock’s Canadian depository receipt in Canadian dollars. Fractional shares of Google can be bought at $55.30 per Canadian depository receipt.
