Proctor and Gamble bought them in 2005. BH has been reducing their holdings since.
It was a good investment though! 
I’ll just be over here updating my portfolio…
And in any case, I believe Berkshire Hathaway makes most of its money from its insurance holdings. (I’ll second the suggestion of reading Buffett’s annual letter to the shareholders. I don’t own shares, but it’s very instructive nonetheless. It’s where I learned about the investment potential of insurance float.)
The insurance holdings generate cash, the cash is used to invest. They’ve been very pleased by the gain in value - and its become a more important portion of the business, but the purpose of the insurance business is the cash.
I’m spending next Saturday in the auditorium at the annual meeting listening to Warren and Charlie speak. I only have a few cheap B shares - and really because we want to go to Omaha in May (doesn’t everyone).
I love that they spend the hosting cost, plus about $100 a year for whichever person adds the annual link. From their phone.
Long story short, in the case of AAPL (other companies may have different motivations), while they have the cash on hand to fully cover their stock buyback and dividend increases, 100% of the reason they are borrowing the money to pay for that instead is for tax reasons.
If I can find the article where I read that, I’ll post it later.
Hello Hermitian, there are several reasons, for which, corporations can’t pay the liabilities by using cash or through sale of capital, etc. The main reason is that every organization try to pay the cash to debtors in systematic way and pay only the committed amount against the liabilities and use remaining cash to perform several business tasks to handle the business affairs.
Well, I did mention it in the first reply to the thread.
He’s confusing “not in the same part of the balance sheet as cash” as being equivalent to debt, which isn’t true. Most balance sheets have 3 parts - assets, liabilities and stockholders’ equity, and stock is obviously(?) part of stockholders’ equity, while cash is considered an asset, and debt is generally considered a liability.
No debt aside, why would Apple have such a huge cash reserve? That sounds kind of strange to me- why wouldn’t they invest it in more long-term things than cash and cash equivalents?
From here:
So you see, here we have an example where borrowing turns a profit.