Berkshire Hathaway's $930M Bet on Bending Spoons Signals a Post-Buffett Investing Shift

Berkshire Hathaway has quietly built a $930 million stake in Bending Spoons, the Italian tech conglomerate known for acquiring and radically restructuring digital businesses. The investment — $600 million at the company's July IPO plus a fresh $330 million private placement at $33 per share, roughly a 13% discount to market price — gives Berkshire about a 4% stake. The announcement triggered a near-50% two-day stock surge before partially retreating, leaving Bending Spoons shares still more than 20% above where they started the week.

Bending Spoons is a peculiar choice for a firm historically allergic to tech. Founded and led by CEO Luca Ferrari, it has spent more than a decade buying distressed or underutilized digital businesses — AOL, Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, WeTransfer — and aggressively overhauling them. The Evernote case is illustrative: when Bending Spoons acquired it in early 2023, it had roughly 350 employees. Ferrari cut that to about 60 within 18 months, then down to around 20. Yet the leaned-out company still managed to ship what Ferrari called its biggest product update in a decade this spring. AI-assisted automation is central to the playbook.

The financials are impressive by growth metrics — revenue surged 126% year-over-year to $704 million in Q2, with adjusted operating income jumping 150% to $381 million — but the valuation is anything but a Buffett-style bargain. Berkshire is paying over 100 times Bending Spoons' 2024 earnings per share of $0.32. That's a sharp departure from the margin-of-safety discipline that defined decades of Buffett investing.

There are real philosophical overlaps between the two firms: both are decentralized conglomerates that buy to hold forever, reinvest cash flows into new acquisitions, and emphasize an ownership culture. Ferrari has explicitly modeled Bending Spoons on Berkshire's structure. But the differences are equally stark — Berkshire is famously hands-off with its subsidiaries, while Bending Spoons' entire edge is aggressive transformation of what it buys.

The deal's authorship is unclear. Buffett stepped down as CEO and chairman earlier this year, and Berkshire has offered no comment. New CEO Greg Abel recently put $10 billion into Alphabet in a private placement, suggesting he's willing to make tech bets. Investment manager Ted Weschler is another candidate. At under $1 billion against a $365 billion cash pile and $1.1 trillion market cap, the stake is small enough to be a quiet experiment — but it could also signal that the post-Buffett Berkshire is willing to color outside the lines it drew for 60 years.