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Warren Buffett continued to slash his stake in Apple as part of a selling spree that has seen his Berkshire Hathaway dump $166bn worth of stocks over the past two years, with the Oracle of Omaha finding few other opportunities to chase in the US stock market.

The sprawling industrial and investment conglomerate disclosed on Saturday that it had reduced its position in Apple to $69.9bn in the third quarter, indicating it had shed a further 100mn shares in the three-month period.

In just over a year, Buffett has ditched almost two-thirds of his stake in the technology company, which at its peak in 2023 accounted for $178bn of the company’s stock portfolio.

The stock sales are a dramatic shift by Buffett, given in 2022 he described Apple as one of Berkshire’s “four giants”, accounting for the bulk of the company’s value. At the company’s shareholder meeting in May he described the iPhone maker as “an even better business” than Coca-Cola and American Express, two of Berkshire’s longtime holdings.

“Unless something dramatically happens that really changes capital allocation strategy, we will have Apple as our largest investment,” Buffett told shareholders at the time.

“But I don’t mind at all, under current conditions, building the cash position,” he added. “I think when I look at the alternative of what’s available in the equity markets and I look at the composition of what’s going on in the world, we find it quite attractive.”

Buffett said that he believed there was a high likelihood the US federal government would raise tax rates in the coming years given the country’s sustained budget deficits, which would reduce Berkshire’s profits on future stock sales.

Berkshire reported on Saturday that it had generated gains of $97bn on the $133bn of stock it has sold this year, which after taxes amounted to a $76.5bn pay-off for the group.

“It’s still the greatest trade of all time by the greatest investor of all time,” said Christopher Rossbach, chief investment officer of longtime Berkshire shareholder J Stern & Co.

“The investment in Apple has defined his last decade and the fact that he is selling Apple now for valuation reasons is testament to his sticking to his principles at a scale that no one has before.”

The billionaire investor has been selling more than just Apple. Over the course of the three months to September, Berkshire sold $36.1bn of stocks, including part of its large position in Bank of America. In October, he reduced his stake in Bank of America below 10 per cent after selling more than $10.5bn worth of the US lender’s stock, an investment that dated back to the global financial crisis.

He has found little else to entice him in the US stock market, buying equities worth just $1.5bn. The 94-year-old has been jettisoning stocks at a remarkable clip, with Berkshire being a net seller of equities for eight consecutive quarters.

Even Berkshire shares were off-limits to the noted value investor, who controls the company’s stock buyback programme. Berkshire did not repurchase any of its shares in the third quarter.

Buffett in turn ploughed the proceeds from those sales back into short-term Treasury bills, pushing the company’s cash position to a record $325.2bn.

The sales raise questions over Buffett’s motivations and his investment outlook, with the investor stockpiling an enormous level of cash unseen in the investment world.

He has been content to earn the relatively high yields on short-term US Treasury bills, even as the Federal Reserve has started to cut interest rates. The company earned nearly $10bn in interest on its cash and Treasury position over the past 12 months, including $3.5bn in the third quarter.

He has built up the company’s cash position before, saying the mountain of liquidity gives Berkshire an ability to pounce in a crisis. However, the company has faced far better capitalised competitors in the years since the financial crisis. Heavyweights in the investment world, including Apollo and Blackstone, are often stepping in to finance companies looking to shore up their balance sheets.

It will set up a challenge for Buffett’s heir apparent, Greg Abel. The 62-year-old energy executive has been charged with leading Berkshire when Buffett eventually steps down, including having oversight over its $271.7bn stock portfolio.

The stock sales were disclosed as part of Berkshire’s quarterly earnings, which showed a decline in operating profits. The company’s insurance businesses have been buffeted by two hurricanes that pounded the south-east US.

Berkshire said Hurricane Helene resulted in losses of $565mn in the third quarter, and that it anticipated losses of between $1.3bn and $1.5bn in the fourth quarter from Hurricane Milton, which struck Florida days later.

The insurance business has also agreed to pay $535mn to resolve asbestos-related talcum powder liabilities, pushing its reinsurance unit to a loss for the quarter.

Overall, operating profits fell 6 per cent from a year earlier to $10.1bn. Buffett has long directed investors to its operating results, which do not include the swings in value of its mammoth stock portfolio. He has warned that reported net income is meaningless given the volatility of the stock market. In the quarter, net income swung to $26.3bn from a loss of $12.8bn a year before.

Class A shares of Berkshire have rallied 25 per cent this year, outpacing the total return of the S&P 500.

Two days before Halloween, a Pennsylvania postal worker was delivering a box of mailed-in ballots to the Northampton County Courthouse. A man filming with his phone began asking questions and followed the postal worker into the building.

The man doing filming was told that the man with the box of ballots was a postal worker.

“I dunno, apparently he’s with the post office, but that looks very suspect,” said the man filming, zooming in on what he said was “an obscene amount of ballots.”

The video then zoomed in for a closeup of the postal worker’s face. As of Nov. 2, it had nearly six million views.

County officials in Pennsylvania confirmed to local news outlets that the man filmed in the video was an acting postmaster, doing his job. After the video went online, he began receiving threats.

Even before Election Day, unsubstantiated rumors about voter fraud are beginning to focus on specific public servants and voters. In 2020, this kind of online activity led to harassment, threats and ultimately, played a role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

But this year, videos like these are appearing in a dedicated community on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, formerly Twitter, and inviting more of the same type of speculation that can result in threats and harassment.

Sharing concerns and trying to make sense of the voting process is a normal part of a free and fair electoral process, said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University and an expert on election disinformation. “But there’s a really big difference between discussing a concern and putting somebody’s face up and accusing them of treason.”

In 2020, DiResta said many major social media platforms did more to try to add context and amplify information from credible sources. Under pressure from Republicans, many platforms have backed off on those policies since then. Perhaps the most important factor has been Twitter’s transformation into X since billionaire Elon Musk bought it in 2022 and has steadily turned the platform into pro-conservative social media site with minimal moderation policies.

“I would say the major difference this time, though, is that X is hosting the communities where this sort of effort at sense-making is taking place,” said DiResta.

Over this past year, Musk has become a major backer of Donald Trump’s campaign and himself become an avid sharer of election fraud rumors on X. This month, the super PAC Musk founded to support Trump created a dedicated space on the social media platform to share crowdsourced instances of potential election fraud, where it has quickly amassed a large following of more than 60,000 users.

“Most of the people who are responding to the posts are convinced that the election is being stolen and so feels a little bit more like a place where they’re trying to just gather evidence to prove the thing that they’ve already decided has happened,” said DiResta. “And they’re concerned about that because they keep hearing it from political elites that they trust – people like Donald Trump and people like Elon Musk.”

Each individual post, DiResta said, is woven into a much broader narrative by politicians and pro-Trump influencers, often with conspiratorial overtones. The amalgamation is meant to imply that evidence of voter fraud is massive and insurmountable, despite more than 60 court cases, multiple recounts and ballot audits, that found no evidence of significant voting irregularities in 2020.

X did not respond to a request for comment from NPR.

Burned by election lies

The impact on the everyday people who get tangled up in these conspiracy theories is profound.

The legal nonprofit Protect Democracy helped file a number of defamation lawsuits against election deniers after the 2020 election, “on behalf of people who found themselves suddenly being lied about in the public sphere for claims that they were breaking the law when they were not breaking the law,” said Protect Democracy counsel Jane Bentrott.

Pro-Trump figures and partisan media organizations like One America News publicly retracted allegations and reached settlements with the people they had falsely accused of election fraud.

Georgia election worker Shaye Moss , right, leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. District Courthouse on Dec. 15, 2023 in Washington, DC. A jury ordered Rudy Giuliani, the former personal lawyer for former U.S. President Donald Trump, to pay $148 million in damages to the two Fulton County election workers, Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

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One prominent case Protect Democracy is involved with is a defamation suit against Trump’s then-attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who baselessly accused two Georgia election workers by name of manipulating ballots.

Giuliani was found liable for defamation and a jury awarded the pair $148 million last year.

“The flame that Giuliani lit with those lies and passed to so many others changed every aspect of our lives. Our homes, our family, our work, our sense of safety, our mental health,” said Shaye Moss, one of the workers, after the jury handed down its verdict.

“As he learned,” said Bentrott, “and hopefully others who are paying attention learned, folks who accuse others falsely of breaking the law can have substantial consequences for those lies.”

But even successful defamation cases often take years to resolve and Giuliani has yet to pay the women anything.

Protect Democracy made an effort to hold high profile figures like Giuliani accountable for spreading false accusations. But overall, the media landscape those influencers are part of has remained intact, according to DiResta.

“What you’re seeing is a pipeline by which somebody makes an allegation, usually a small account, a person with a very concern that feels very real to them, but it’s picked up by a person who has maybe tens to hundreds of thousands of followers.”

DiResta has studied the way the January 6th Capitol riot was motivated in part by beliefs in the messages this pipeline generated.

The day after posting the video of the Pennsylvania postal worker, its creator wrote on X that if the subject of his video did turn out to be just a public servant doing his job, “I’ll take this down and issue a correcting statement. We are after the truth, whatever that may be.” As of Nov. 2, the video remains online.

DiResta said she’s confident American election officials are better prepared for what’s coming this election, but ultimately, “The tone is set still at the top. The people on social media are able to come up with evidence, but they’re doing it to fit the frame set by the political leaders.”