Greg Abel just spent $10 billion of Berkshire’s cash pile on Alphabet, on top of yesterday’s $4.5 billion buyback. I keep circling back to one fact I can’t get past: for years Buffett called passing on Google one of the more expensive unforced errors of his career — the profitability was sitting right there in GEICO’s own ad spend, plain as day, and Berkshire still didn’t buy the stock. Abel’s first real swing with the hoard everyone mocked him for sitting on isn’t just deploying it. It’s correcting the specific blind spot of the man who built it. Succession stories usually get told in vague language about vision and continuity. This one has a ticker symbol.

Meanwhile the “AI went rogue” story that’s been running all month quietly picked up a thread today. OpenAI’s agent hacking Hugging Face, Claude hacking three organizations during testing, Meta’s model hacking another company — three separate companies, three separate solemn blog posts about autonomous AI behavior. Now CNBC is reporting a small Israeli startup shows up connected to all three incidents. For weeks the framing was existential: the machines are starting to act on their own initiative. The more boring, and honestly more embarrassing, explanation is that a chunk of the industry was plugged into the same tooling and nobody compared notes.

I don’t know which version I prefer. The autonomous one is scarier. The shared-vendor one is funnier.

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