Money. Warren Buffett has some.

Berkshire Hathaway’s mountainous cash pile grew for a ninth consecutive quarter in Q3, amid ongoing stock sales.

Quarterly “earnings” from Berkshire released on Saturday showed the conglomerate’s cash stash swelled by more than $46 billion last quarter.

As a reminder, Berkshire cashed in (or cashed out, depending on how you want to look at it) to the tune of nearly $88 billion in Q2, when Buffett aggressively trimmed his stake in Apple.

If you’re curious, Buffett sold more Apple in Q3. A lot more, by apperances.

Berkshire’s stake in Steve Jobs’s legacy was worth $70 billion on September 30, Saturday’s 10Q showed. That was down from $84 billion at the end of June.

At the peak in Q2 2023, Berkshire’s Apple was worth $180 billion, give or take.

In August, when Berkshire’s quarterly revealed what the financial media variously described as a “selling spree,” I penned a tongue-in-cheek title: “Remain Calm: Buffett Goes To Cash.” I thought that was funny, but nobody (besides me) was laughing 36 hours later, when the Nikkei crashed 12% in the worst single-session selloff for Japanese stocks ever, bar none. A couple of hours after Japan closed, parts of the US vol complex went nuts and Wall Street had its worst day since September of 2022.

To be clear: Exactly none of that had anything whatever to do with Buffett. The previous week, the Bank of Japan raised rates for a second time in four months, putting more pressure on yen-funded carry (in all its various manifestations), a situation made worse by an alarmingly low ISM manufacturing employment print and, the next day, a weak US jobs report, which together pressured USDJPY lower still. It was a perfect storm for a stock crash in Japan, and the panic vibes from Tokyo didn’t play well with a fragile VIX options space. That’s the story of July 31-August 5. No Buffett mentions necessary.

Of course, not everyone understood all (or any) of that, and even among those who did, Buffett invariably ended up as a character in a drama that had nothing to do with him because… well, because the surest way to sell your market coverage is to include Buffett in the narrative, or even better, in the headline. If you’re going to go there, you may as well go one-word, exclamation: “Buffett!”

The figure below shows Buffett’s net-selling of “other” stocks (i.e., stocks other than Berkshire’s) over Q3 came to almost $35 billion.

A few people asked last quarter how to calculate the net selling figure for Berkshire. It’s not difficult: Word-search the quarterlies for “proceeds from sales of equity securities” and net them against “purchases of equity securities.”

Berkshire now has $323 billion in cash. Buffett has lamented a dearth of attractive cash-deployment opportunities, big, small or in-between. Earlier this year, he told legions of acolytes Berkshire’s now so large that the conglomerate has “no possibility of eye-popping performance.”

Here’s an idea: Buffett should buy Elon Musk, take Musk private, restructure him as a good person and IPO him once he’s reformed. $323 billion gets you there, with around $100 billion to spare. “Funding secured!”