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Ranked: The Companies Holding the Most Cash in the World

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The cash that companies hold is important for paying employees, funding operations, and as a measure of financial health.

This chart shows the 50 companies with the largest cash holdings, using data from TradingView to highlight who is sitting on the largest war chests.

This metric captures a company’s most liquid assets: cash plus short-term securities like T-bills that typically mature within a year.

Which Companies Hold the Most Cash?

Berkshire Hathaway leads the rankings with an impressive $382 billion.

The data table below shows the top 50 companies worldwide with the largest cash and short-term securities holdings:

Source: TradingView | Cash and Short-Term Investments | as of Feb 11, 2026

Following Berkshire are CITIC—a Chinese state-backed financial conglomerate—and Daiwa Securities Group, one of Japan’s biggest financial brokerages.

Big Tech rounds out the top five, with Alphabet holding $127 billion and Amazon holding $126 billion.

Why Buffett Holds So Much Cash

Among the top 50 companies, the Financials sector collectively holds the largest cash reserves at $1.2 trillion—partially driven by strict capital rules requiring banks to maintain large liquid buffers.

Berkshire Hathaway is different: its cash position is strategic, not regulatory.

After 12 straight quarters as a net seller of stocks, Buffett and the team have parked much of the company’s liquidity in short-term U.S. Treasury bills, implying that equity valuations look expensive.

The Oracle’s cash and cash equivalents as a percentage of total assets is at an all-time high—roughly 31% of total assets.

Historically, this has coincided with periods when he waits for a major economic or market dislocation before deploying capital as prices begin to mean-revert—quietly accumulating dry powder in the meantime.

Why Big Tech Holds So Much Cash

The Magnificent Seven: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia and Tesla collectively hold $597 billion—enough to buy most S&P 500 companies.

Traditionally, Big Tech companies are massive cash machines: high gross margins and scalable cost structures mean incremental revenue converts into cash quickly.

Despite spending heavily to build AI factories, they’ve used little of their cash reserves to finance them—opting instead for debt.

They hold large cash stockpiles both to fund acquisitions and guard against potential economic turmoil, such as threats from tariffs or geopolitical conflicts.

Learn More on the Voronoi App

To learn more about the world’s largest companies, check out this graphic on Voronoi.

Charted: The Growth of $100 by Asset Class (1965–2025)

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What would $100 invested in 1965 be worth today? For stocks, it would’ve multiplied 435 times, but other asset classes have significantly lower returns.

Here’s how each asset class performed over 60 years, based on data from NYU Stern professor Aswath Damodaran.

Stocks reflect S&P 500 total returns with dividends reinvested, real estate follows the Case-Shiller Home Price Index (price only), and cash represents three-month U.S. Treasury bills.

Stocks Outperform Other Asset Classes Since 1965

The table below shows the nominal (before inflation) returns of a $100 investment across six major asset classes between 1965 and 2025, with values representing the investment’s value at year-end:

Numbers have been rounded. S&P 500 includes dividends. Cash represented by 3-Month U.S. T-Bills. Corporate Bonds represented by Baa corporate bonds. Real Estate represented by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. | As of Dec-31-2025

Stocks can build wealth faster than other major assets because company profits tend to grow over time, dividends can be reinvested, and returns compound.

The trade-off is risk and volatility as stock prices can swing sharply up and down.

In this 60-year window, a large share of equity gains happened during two major bull cycles.

Two big bull runs drove most stock gains: 1982–2000 (about 17x) and the post-2008 rebound (about 10x), so missing either one could’ve significantly dampened investment returns.

How Drawdowns and Recoveries Affect Returns

Every asset class has faced major drawdowns and recoveries, but stocks were often the fastest to recover.

In 2008, equities fell 37% in a single year, then rebounded to new highs in roughly four years as aggressive Fed support steadied markets.

After the COVID-19 shock, bonds—long seen as a safe haven—suffered their worst two-year stretch in decades.

Gold saw the longest dry spell: after its 1980 peak, it took 26 years just to break even as high real rates and a strong dollar dragged on returns. Once it finally cleared that level, it nearly doubled again by 2011.

Real estate also took time after its major drawdown—after the housing bust in 2008/2009, prices needed about a decade to fully recover.

Together, these cycles show that while no asset class is immune to deep losses, recovery timelines can vary dramatically—and patience often matters as much as diversification.

Learn More on the Voronoi App

To learn more about stock performance over the last 152 years, check out this graphic on Voronoi which plots out each year’s S&P 500 return.