Why does Warren Buffett have $325 billion in cash?

Warren Buffett is in the remarkable position of being able to buy a $100 billion company with cash if he wanted to. Or two of them. Or three. The world's most admired investor has been selling off shares to amass a record $325 billion cash pile (much of it not in fact in cash but 10-year US treasury bonds), and the WSJ is wondering if he knows something the markets don't. Tortoise wondered the same thing in August when the stash was worth only $277 billion, and concluded Buffett may have been sceptical about AI. But it's not AI companies that Buffett has been selling recently. It's mainly Apple and Bank of America. Some who see him as a financial earthquake predictor recall he was long on cash before the Crash, but analysts don't see another one of them round the corner. Rather, they see a long-term slide in annual returns from big US companies, which is a far cry from last week's sugar rush after Trump's election win. Buffet has outperformed the market 140 times over since the 1960s but doesn't seem to expect to do so again over the next four years.