A Berkshire insider bought $250,000 worth of its stock on the downturn. It wasn't the new CEO

Berkshire Hathaway Chief Legal Officer Michael O'Sullivan, who has only been in the position since the beginning of the year, bought shares in the company for the first time on Wednesday, Ma. 6. According to a Form 4 filed with the SEC, he bought 536 shares of Class B stock at an average price of about $468 per paper: that works out to a total of about $250,000. O'Sullivan now owns 663 shares of Berkshire stock with a total value of about $300,000.

O'Sullivan joined Berkshire after Snap, which owns messenger Snapchat, and before that spent more than 20 years at Munger, Tolles & Olson, a law firm co-founded by former Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger, who died in 2023, Barron's notes. This is the first time a legal director position has been created at Berkshire: previously, the company mainly used the services of external specialists, the publication says.

O'Sullivan's purchases were the first insider acquisitions since Berkshire's new chief executive, Greg Abel, bought 21 Class A shares for about $15 million in March at about $729,000 per paper. Abel has pledged to put the net proceeds from his $25 million compensation toward buying company stock each year.

A number of shareholders expect more active buying by management, especially from Abel: the Berkshire stake is probably less than 20% of his fortune, Barron's notes. He could own many more Berkshire shares, and the purchases would send a positive signal to investors, the publication adds.

Berkshire shares are now notably underperforming the market: class B securities have lost about 6.5% since the beginning of the year, giving up about 14 percentage points to the S&P 500, and over the distance of the past 12 months, the gap is up to nearly 40 percentage points.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor