JPMorgan’s Combs Directs $5 Billion in Spending Since Joining

(Bloomberg) -- Todd Combs, the former stockpicker at Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has helped allocate around $5 billion of investments from his new perch at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Most Read from Bloomberg Epic Games Delays Disney Project, Asks Developers to Use More AI Apple Unveils $299 HomeView Hub as Part of New Smart Home Push Stocks Bounce From Lows on Williams' Rate Remarks: Markets Wrap Chip Selloff Sparks 7% Korea Rout on Brewing Worries Over AI PepsiCo Cuts Estimates for Poppi Payout While Soda Sales Slump Combs, who oversees the bank's strategic investment group that's focused on industries critical to national security, said he helped funnel money for investments in 10 firms, helping his group put about half of the amount it was originally given to work. "We can do early private, we can do late stage public, we can do anything and everything," he said Tuesday at Grant's Annual Fall Conference in New York. But private markets have "inefficiencies that don't exist on the public side, and I try and go where there are inefficiencies. And so I've spent almost all of my time on the private side." The comments offer a glimpse into Combs' initial work at JPMorgan after he joined the biggest US bank earlier this year. Before joining the company, Combs was one of the two stock-pickers that worked with Buffett to manage Berkshire's massive stock portfolio. He was also the chief executive officer of Geico, a major insurance business owned by Berkshire. At JPMorgan, Combs has been tasked for a broad role that includes leading the strategic investment group as well as advising CEO Jamie Dimon and some of his top lieutenants. The strategic investment group is part of JPMorgan's so-called "Security and Resiliency Initiative," which also includes a push to put $1.5 trillion to work over the next decade to bolster crucial US industries. "We had this idea as a country that we could outsource the really, really hard stuff," Combs said, citing how the US relied on China for battery production. JPMorgan's investments are "about bringing a lot of that back." Combs said JPMorgan's investments were somewhat insulated from broader concerns over private-asset valuation practices as his group marks their investments "conservatively." He cited a maxim from Charlie Munger — who passed in 2023 after years working as business partner of Buffett: "Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome." For Combs, that saying fits with why some private funds may overstate the true value of their holdings. Story Continues "I'm not picking on people that have funds — many of these people are my friends — but if you have an incentive to market, to raise another fund," he said. "We don't have that. It's our capital. There are no LPs. JPMorgan is the LP and it's our capital, and so we're going to mark it extremely, extremely conservatively." Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek College Volleyball Hits the Big Time The NFL's $192 Million Bet on Flag Football Is Paying Off With Teen Girls Nobel Prize in Economics Celebrates the Power of the Individual How Elon Musk Became a Big-Screen Supervillain It's a Tough Time to Launch a Hedge Fund ©2026 Bloomberg L.P. View Comments