In the final stretch of his tenure atop Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett was still pursuing that elusive elephant.

The 95-year-old legendary investor, who handed over the CEO reins to Greg Abel at the start of 2026, made it clear that deal size was not the constraint, it was lack of opportunities.

“It’s external circumstances. Believe me if after we get finished talking you say, ‘I’ve got a great $100 billion new idea.’ I would say, ‘Let’s talk,'” Buffett told Becky Quick in a special interview in May after he said he was stepping down at the end of the year.

The never-before-seen interview is part of the “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy” special airing Tuesday at 7 p.m. ET. on CNBC.

The remarks underscore a central paradox at Berkshire today. The company is awash in liquidity, with its cash hoard swelling to a record $381.6 billion at the end of the third quarter, but Buffett found no opportunities in 2025 large enough to move the needle at prices he considers sensible.

“It means that when I look at the stock market, when I look at companies of a size that would make any difference to our total, I don’t see anything. Well, we’re buying one or two things, but it’s peanuts. But I’m willing to spend $100 billion this afternoon, you know,” Buffett, now chairman, told CNBC.

In October, Berkshire closed a deal to buy Occidental Petroleum’s chemical business, OxyChem, for $9.7 billion in cash, marking its largest purchase since 2022, when it paid $11.6 billion for insurer Alleghany.

Berkshire’s cash has grown significantly after Buffett aggressively dumped enormous pieces of his two largest holdings, Apple and Bank of America. 

Buffett doesn’t want to be sitting on this much cash. He has long warned that cash is a poor long-term asset, even as he insists on holding ample reserves to weather unforeseen shocks.

“I’d rather have $100 billion and a really good business at a sensible price than have $100 billion in cash,” he said. “At certain levels, cash is necessary, but cash is not a good asset.”

He likened liquidity to oxygen, cheap to maintain and catastrophic to run out of at the wrong moment.

“You always want to have enough,” Buffett said. “You don’t have to pay a lot for it. But you do need oxygen. And cash is that way. You always need to have it available because you do not know what will happen. I do not know what the stock market will do, and I do not know what business will do.”

Abel has been a longtime lieutenant who played a central role in several of Berkshire’s acquisitions particularly in energy, and helped transform Berkshire Hathaway Energy into a powerhouse.

While Abel’s deal-making credentials are established, Berkshire shareholders may not extend him the same patience they have long afforded Buffett. With the conglomerate sitting on a mountain of cash and shares underperforming the…

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs had just finished taking victory laps after a blockbuster quarter when concerns emerged from an obscure corner of Wall Street, sending a collective shiver through global finance.

Regional bank Zions late Wednesday disclosed a near total wipeout on $60 million in loans after finding “apparent misrepresentations” from the borrowers. The next day, peer Western Alliance said that it had sued the same borrower, a commercial real estate firm called the Cantor Group, for alleged fraud.

The result was a sudden and deep selloff among regional banks, drawing comparisons to the churn of the 2023 banking crisis that consumed Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic. This time around, investors are focused on a specific type of lending made by banks to non-depository financial institutions, or NDFIs, as the source of possible contagion.

“When you see one cockroach, there are probably more,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said this week. “Everyone should be forewarned on this one.”

Concerns over credit quality had been simmering for weeks after the September collapse of two U.S. auto-related companies. JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, this week reported a $170 million loss tied to one of them, the subprime auto lender Tricolor.

But it wasn’t until a third case of alleged fraud around loans made to NDFIs that investors were jolted into fearing the worst, according to Truist banking analyst Brian Foran.

“You now have had three situations where there was alleged fraud” involving NDFIs, Foran said.

Dimon’s comments “really resonated with people who were like, ‘Oh, man, the tide went out a little bit, and now we’re seeing who was lacking their swim trunks,” Foran said.

But it turns out, banks are a major source of funding for non-bank lenders: commercial loans to NDFIs reached $1.14 trillion as of March, per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Bank loans made to non-bank financial firms were the single fastest-growing category, rising 26% annually since 2012, according to the St. Louis Fed.

“The surge in NDFI lending was really because all these different regulations added up to say there are a bunch of loans banks can’t do anymore, but if they lend to someone else who does them, that’s OK,” Foran said.

“We really don’t know much about these NDFI books,” Foran said. “People are saying, ‘I didn’t know it was so easy for a bank to think they had $50 million in collateral and find out they had zero.'”