Gates Foundation Trust tilts from Berkshire into hard-asset cash machines

The biggest‑buys widget is empty for a reason: this quarter the Trust didn’t add to anything. That’s not drift — it’s a statement that the current roster of compounding machines is already sized where they want it.

Look at the core: Canadian National Railway at 16.82%, Caterpillar at 14.22%, and Deere at 6.33% sit untouched, despite large embedded gains at Caterpillar and Deere. These are classic toll‑road businesses on trade, construction, and agriculture, and the Trust is happy to let operating leverage to global infrastructure and food demand compound without trying to time entries.

Further down the book, Ecolab, Walmart, FedEx, and the waste duo (Waste Management and Waste Connections) are all held flat. The pattern is clear: once a name has made it into this book at scale, the Trust treats it as a multi‑cycle, let‑it‑run asset, not a trading position to express quarter‑to‑quarter macro views.

With no new positions and no adds, the only real message comes from the trims. The Trust cut Berkshire Hathaway by -12.2%, pulling about $1.13B off the table, and shaved Waste Management by -4.5%, about $296.9M.

Berkshire at 25.8% of the disclosed book is still the anchor; this is a risk‑management trim, not a vote of no confidence. Berkshire has become a meta‑exposure to many of the same themes the Trust likes directly — regulated utilities, industrials, durable consumer — so letting its weight balloon further would double‑up economic exposure and governance risk.

The Waste Management cut looks like classic discipline: a long‑held, highly profitable position (sitting roughly +142.0% above average cost) that has simply worked too well to leave untrimmed at a 20.06% weight. They are harvesting gains at the margin from mature winners that have already proven the thesis, not bailing on the underlying economics.

On the surface, sector shifts look minimal, but the nuance matters. Industrials ticked up from 36.0% to 37.62%, while the Berkshire “unclassified” bucket fell from 28.1% to 25.8%.

Functionally, this is a rotation from one catch‑all holding (Berkshire) toward explicit exposure to rails, machinery, and industrial tools — Canadian National, Caterpillar, Deere, Danaher, and Veralto. The Trust is quietly privileging direct ownership of operating assets over owning them indirectly through a conglomerate.

Elsewhere, Utilities (really environmental services) stayed flat at 21.11%, and Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, and Health Care each nudged up only a few basis points. That tells you the macro call hasn’t changed: they’re still betting that regulated‑like waste, logistics, and industrial incumbents are the best shock absorbers in an uncertain rate and inflation regime.

This 13F isn’t a trading log; it’s an x‑ray of how a large, permanent pool of philanthropic capital intends to survive multiple cycles. By trimming Berkshire and Waste Management, the Trust shows it will occasionally prune even its favorite branches to keep concentration and correlation in check, but the tree itself — essential, high‑moat, cash‑gushing incumbents — is unchanged.

Several smaller positions are quietly telling: they’re sitting on harsh drawdowns in names like Coupang, Schrodinger, Kraft Heinz, and Hormel, yet didn’t add or cut. That suggests a willingness to ride through pain when a thesis is long‑dated, and a refusal to chase “average down” optics for the sake of quarterly positioning.

Going forward, expect any real rotation to come not from flurries of small trades but from the rare decision to upsize or introduce a new oligopoly‑like franchise. Until then, the message from 2026‑Q1 is simple: the Trust is content to let industrials, waste, logistics, and staple brands do what they do best — compound quietly — while guarding against any one giant, even Berkshire, becoming the entire story.