Tepper placed puts on AAPL and BRK-B as one trade, since Berkshire's $66B Apple stake makes it a cheap, low-volatility proxy short. Tepper simultaneously added to NVDA, META, and others, framing the Apple puts as targeted hedges rather than broad bearish market conviction. Apple's $2.02 Q3 EPS included 11 cents from non-recurring tariff refunds, leaving a 35x P/E stock exposed on weakening underlying fundamentals.
Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Apple didn't make the cut. Grab the names FREE today. When David Tepper opens put positions against two of the most widely held names in America, I pay attention.
According to Appaloosa's 13F filing (positions as of June 30, 2026, disclosed August 14, 2026), the firm initiated new put positions referencing 835,000 underlying Apple shares ($241,615,600 notional) on Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and 25,000 underlying Berkshire Class B shares ($12,509,750 notional) on Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK-B) Class B shares. Let's dive into how significant these positions are and what Tepper could be seeing. Before going any further, there's an important caveat about how to read 13Fs.
A 13F discloses only the notional value of the underlying shares behind an option position. Strike prices, expirations, and premiums paid are not disclosed, so the actual capital at risk is unknown and almost certainly a fraction of those headline figures. The Berkshire position is not as large as it looks on paper.
A put is a bearish or hedging exposure, not an outright short sale. We cannot know from the filing whether this is a directional bet, a hedge, or one leg of a spread. Apple is Berkshire's largest disclosed equity position.
Berkshire held 227,917,808 Apple shares valued at $65,950,296,923 at quarter-end and did not sell a single share. If you want to press a bearish view on Apple and extend it efficiently, puts on Berkshire Hathaway are a clean way to do it. The relative sizing supports this reading: the Apple notional is roughly 20x the Berkshire notional.
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