Author: Le Ming

On May 2, 2026,Omaha. Out of eighteen thousand seats, only a little more than half were occupied this time—previously, tickets to the Berkshire shareholder meeting had to be queued for, with hotels nearby fully booked.

This time, the 95-year-old Buffett did not host the event on stage as he had in previous years; the new CEO Greg Abel stood in front of the main screen, answering investors' inquiries about why Berkshire held nearly 400 billion dollars in cash.

In the same week, six thousand miles away in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son’s team was doing something else: packaging SoftBank Group's unprofitable AI assets, preparing to establish a new company called Roze AI, with a target valuation of 100 billion dollars, planning to go public in the United States in the second half of 2026.

The reason is simple: SoftBank must continue to raise funds for the 64.6 billion dollar check to OpenAI, which could ultimately roll up to nearly a hundred billion.

One holds 397.4 billion dollars in cash, buys nothing, and waits for the market to crash; the other shoulders 16.34 trillion yen (over 10 billion dollars) in interest-bearing liabilities, betting that the market will not crash.

Berkshire: Having Too Much Money is a Disease

What does 397.4 billion dollars mean?

It represents nearly 40% of Berkshire's total market value and is double the average cash level Buffett has had over the past twenty years.

Of this, 339.3 billion dollars is directly held in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds, and Berkshire has also become one of the largest non-government creditors of the U.S. Treasury.

This pile of money wasn't passively accumulated; it was actively built up.

In the past fourteen quarters, Berkshire has been a net seller of stocks each quarter. Apple, once its top holding, has been gradually reduced over four consecutive quarters starting from the third quarter of 2024, with nearly 688 million shares sold for more than 10 billion dollars.

Buffett's explanation has always been the same: there are no cheap options available.

In his 2024 letter to shareholders, he wrote a line—"Generally speaking, there doesn't seem to be anything appealing." In a recent non-public interview after the shareholder meeting, he compared the current market to "a church connected to a casino," saying that among all the market sentiments he has experienced, this is the most akin to gambling.

The problem is, he has been making this judgment for over 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—this is one of the largest relative drawdowns since Buffett took over Berkshire in 1965; the last time such a level of underperformance occurred was in the final stages of the internet bubble in 1999.

At that time, Buffett said he would only buy "cutting-edge industries like bricks, carpets, insulation materials, and paint." Two years later, the Nasdaq fell by 78%, and he was proven right.

But this time, investors have waited for more than two years. The market rises, Berkshire remains stagnant; the market rises again, Berkshire still remains stagnant. On the day Buffett officially stepped down as CEO, the stock price of Berkshire fell slightly — the market expressed a restrained disappointment in the most subdued way.

This is the situation Abel found himself in when he took over. He is a Canadian accountant who rose to become Berkshire's Vice Chairman, having spent his life in capital-intensive, regulated, slow-growing sectors like utilities, railroads, and energy.

He is not Buffett, and he knows he is not Buffett. In his first letter to shareholders, he emphasized "continuity" and "decentralization," and at his first shareholder meeting, he absolutely ruled out any suggestions about splitting the group.

Abel's dilemma is this: he cannot utilize this cash (because the market is too expensive), nor can he continue to pretend this money does not exist (because investors are voting with their feet).

If the market continues to rise for the next five to ten years, he will eventually face a question that has never been seriously discussed in Berkshire's history— distributing the money. Either return it to shareholders in the form of special dividends or genuinely dismantle and sell this monster stitched together by more than 60 subsidiaries.

Will Berkshire die? It will not die suddenly. Its assets are too diversified, cash too abundant, liabilities too low, and any external shock is unlikely to truly break it. But it will slowly and decently transform into something else.

SoftBank's Problem: Too Little Money and Still Betting

Masayoshi Son's situation is the opposite mirror of Abel's.

On February 27, 2026, SoftBank issued a statement. The key sentence translated reads: "SoftBank Group's cumulative investment in OpenAI is expected to reach 64.6 billion dollars, holding approximately 13%."

64.6 billion, 13%. This is the most expensive single bet of this era.

To understand the madness of this number, one must look at how SoftBank can afford this amount.

SoftBank's interest-bearing liabilities at the parent company level soared from 12.14 trillion yen in March 2025 to 16.34 trillion yen in December 2025. The so-called cash at the parent company is about 3.8 trillion yen, of which nearly one-third is actually unutilized committed credit lines, not real cash.

Where did this money come from? SoftBank borrowed 20 billion dollars against its held Arm stock as collateral; it also raised about 7.7 billion dollars from the pledged shares of its Japanese telecom subsidiary SBKK.

On March 27, 2026, SoftBank signed an unprecedented 40 billion dollar bridge loan, led by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Mizuho, Sumitomo Mitsui, and Mitsubishi UFJ, later expanded to 8 banks—this is one of the largest bridge loans in Asian history. Of this money, 30 billion is directly earmarked for investment in OpenAI. The term is 12 months, meaning by March 2027, SoftBank must repay 40 billion dollars.

This is why Masayoshi Son has seemed a bit "abnormal" this year: he sold all SoftBank's Nvidia shares, bringing in 5.8 billion dollars, which was a one-time sell-off in October 2025. He admitted during a Tokyo speech in early December 2025: "I didn't want to sell a single share of Nvidia, but I needed more money to invest in OpenAI. I cried while selling Nvidia."

Masayoshi Son is essentially "selling everything he has" to raise money for investment in OpenAI: he also sold SoftBank's holdings in T-Mobile—selling 56.9 million shares in the first three quarters of the 2025 fiscal year for 12.7 billion dollars; and then selling another 12.5 million shares in the fourth quarter for 2.3 billion. Deutsche Telekom has also been completely liquidated, and Alibaba is gone too. At the end of April this year, SoftBank began to organize a 10 billion dollar margin loan using OpenAI shares as collateral, with an interest rate reaching nearly 8%.

At the same time, SoftBank is also issuing debt everywhere: in November 2025, SoftBank issued a 500 billion yen bond with a coupon rate of 3.98%; in April 2026, it issued another 418 billion yen subordinated bond with the first five-year coupon of 4.97%—this is the most expensive retail bond in SoftBank history and has the highest coupon rate among Japanese non-financial corporate yen retail bonds—indicating that the market has begun to have "suspicions" about SoftBank's debt.

The credit market's response is direct: SoftBank's five-year credit default swap soared to 355 basis points in early March, reaching an 11-month high.

Masayoshi Son's recent "savior" is hoping that OpenAI can go public as soon as possible; otherwise, if the debt pressure becomes long-term, it could really blow up SoftBank.

However, although OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman advocates for an IPO in the fourth quarter of 2026, CFO Sarah Friar suggests postponing it to 2027—this public split between the CEO and CFO signals to the market that there is uncertainty within the company regarding its readiness.

"One Sure to Die"

Berkshire's death will be mild.

It will not go bankrupt— its subsidiaries are all quality cash cows, and it has an extremely low level of debt; even if the AI capital expenditure bubble bursts, even if data center demand halves, even if the S&P 500 falls by 50%, Berkshire's cash pile will be enough for it to gobble up any bargain over the next ten years.

Its death is a death of identity— Buffett's myth of "buying good businesses at rock-bottom prices," in a world where valuations are always above 30 times earnings and where the ten-year Treasury yield has shattered all traditional valuation models, may no longer be valid.

Abel may perform excellently as a "rational CEO"—continuing operations, continuing slight buybacks, and continuing to engage in small acquisitions on the margins—but Berkshire, as a narrative of capitalist discipline, has already died the moment Buffett stopped writing letters. Its shell remains, but its soul has exited.

SoftBank's demise, however, may be dramatic. There are three triggers for its death, and any one of them being pulled could spark a chain reaction:

The first trigger is OpenAI. If its IPO is postponed to 2027 or even 2028, if Amazon's 35 billion dollar commitment tied to the IPO ultimately cannot be fulfilled, if OpenAI's revenue growth stops in any quarter—even if just one quarter—the valuation of SoftBank's 13% stake in OpenAI will be reassessed downwards.

The second trigger is Arm. Arm is currently SoftBank's only truly liquid and still highly priced asset—valued at about 200 billion dollars, with SoftBank holding 87%.

Arm's royalty income increased by 26% year-on-year in the third quarter of fiscal 2026, and royalty income related to data centers doubled, which is one of the pillars supporting SoftBank's entire valuation story.

But Arm is also currently the easiest asset to be repriced—once it reverts from the current forward P/E ratio of 70 to a "normal" semiconductor company valuation, the coverage ratio of SoftBank's 20 billion Arm collateral loans will collapse.

The third trigger is the refinancing itself. The 40 billion bridge loan matures in March 2027, and before that, SoftBank must achieve at least one of the following: OpenAI's public listing, Roze AI's public listing, sell a batch of assets, or issue a similar-sized bond to roll it over.

But every option is pricier than the previous year—SoftBank's retail bond coupon rate has already risen from 3.98% in 2025 to 4.97% in 2026.

Among these three triggers, none of them appear high probability on their own—OpenAI is likely to go public, Arm is unlikely to collapse immediately, and the credit market is unlikely to suddenly close its doors on SoftBank overnight.But they share an undeniable characteristic: they are highly correlated, not three independent events.

If the bubble does not burst, Masayoshi Son will ultimately be canonized: Roze AI will go public at a 100 billion valuation, OpenAI will have a successful IPO, and he will achieve the ASI (Artificial Superintelligence) narrative he has spoken of in his 70s.

Meanwhile, Berkshire will be gently, continuously, and irreversibly marginalized by the market under Abel's prudent management—until one day, some successor will have to do what Buffett has refused to do all his life.

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