Berkshire did not sell DaVita. DaVita bought, and the percentage is the proof Berkshire Hathaway · DaVita Inc. · Form 4, 29 October
- Who
- Berkshire Hathaway Inc. as a 10% owner of DaVita. Coverage is attributing the action personally — one syndicated piece is headlined “Berkshire’s New CEO Just Offloaded DaVita Stocks: Should You Sell Yours Too?”, putting it on Greg Abel. The position was built from the fourth quarter of 2011 under Buffett-era Berkshire; the attribution to a current decision-maker is the thing this entry disputes.
- What happened
- On 27 October, 382,563 shares were disposed at $180.43, about $69,026,033, leaving 28,314,666 shares held indirectly — roughly 45% of DaVita, the same percentage as before the transaction.
- The document
- Form 4 filed 29 October 2026 at 17:21 ET. Contemporaneous reporting describes the counterparty as DaVita itself, under an arrangement established in April 2024 whereby DaVita repurchases shares quarterly from Berkshire so that Berkshire’s stake “remains at 45%”, priced at a volume-weighted average reflecting shares acquired from public investors over the period.
Consensus read
Berkshire is reducing a long-held position. $69m is real money, it follows years of trimming, and it arrives during a leadership handover — so it is being read as the new regime cleaning up an inherited holding, and as a signal that retail holders should reconsider.
Steelmanned: Berkshire has in fact reduced its DaVita share count repeatedly since early 2025, the dialysis industry faces reimbursement and GLP-1-driven volume questions, and a shrinking share count is the normal first evidence of an exit beginning. Nothing about that chain of reasoning is lazy.
Contrarian read
No sell decision was taken on 27 October, by Abel or anyone else. DaVita’s own buyback shrinks the denominator; the April 2024 agreement requires that Berkshire’s stake be brought back to 45% when it drifts above; Berkshire hands back whatever share count the arithmetic produces.
Berkshire is the passive side of DaVita’s capital return. The informative party in this filing is DaVita’s board, which is still retiring stock. Reading Berkshire’s exposure as falling gets the direction exactly backwards: holding 45% of a smaller company while the company buys back stock is how you stay still, not how you leave.
Evidence that discriminates
- The percentage did not change. Before: about 45%. After: about 45%. This is the crux and it is a single field. Every genuine reduction lowers the owner’s percentage — that is what reduction means. A disposal that leaves the percentage untouched is definitionally not a reduction in economic exposure; it is the restoration of a cap. No version of the consensus read survives that one number.
- The counterparty is the issuer, so there is no timing decision to interpret. The shares went back to DaVita at a volume-weighted average set by DaVita’s own market purchases. There was no bid to hit, no price to pick, no moment to choose. The things an observer normally reads off a sale — when, at what level, into what tape — do not exist here.
- The same mechanic, with the same wording, in February 2025. Berkshire disposed of 203,091 shares, reported at the time as cutting the stake to 45%. The identical sentence attaching to a different share count eighteen months apart is the signature of a rule running, not of a judgement being exercised. A base rate of one repetition is thin; a base rate with the cap named each time is not.
Facts that do not discriminate: the $69m figure, the 2011 cost basis, the GLP-1 narrative, and the Abel transition. Each is compatible with both readings, and the $69m is the one doing most of the rhetorical work in the headlines.
What would falsify me
Any quarter in which Berkshire’s DaVita stake prints below 45%. That would be a real decision rather than a cap being restored, and the mechanical reading would be wrong from that filing forward. It is a single observable number, published quarterly.
A Form 4 showing open-market disposals rather than an issuer repurchase. If the counterparty stops being DaVita, the whole argument goes.
The agreement itself giving Berkshire discretion to decline. Honest limit: this scan did not read the April 2024 agreement directly — the mechanics above come from contemporaneous reporting of it. If the text makes the quarterly repurchase optional on Berkshire’s side, then a choice is being made each quarter after all, and “passive counterparty” is too strong a description.
Pattern vs its own history Fourth consecutive year of the same shape. The position dates from Q4 2011. The share count has been walked down repeatedly since early 2025 while the percentage has been pinned at 45% throughout. The share count is not the decision variable here. The percentage is — and it has not moved.