Sirius XM Holdings heads into its May 28 earnings call with a headline-grabbing ownership shift dominating the conversation: Berkshire Hathaway has sold its entire position in the company.
The news, reported on May 15, marks a stark reversal for the Warren Buffett conglomerate, which had built a stake of 124.8 million shares — roughly 37% of the company — through a series of purchases in mid-2025. Those buys, concentrated in July and August of last year at prices around $21, now look like the high-conviction entry that defined SIRI's ownership story. The exit is significant. Berkshire was by far the largest holder, dwarfing second-placed John Malone's 6.5% stake. Its departure removes a major anchor shareholder from the register and raises questions the Street will be asking well before the May 28 call.
The positioning picture tells a more constructive story, at least in the short-lending market. Short interest has been falling steadily — down nearly 4% over the week and 4.7% over the past month — to 9.5% of the free float, its lowest level in this recent run. That follows a notable spike on May 11, when SI briefly climbed back above 10.5% before retreating sharply. The cost to borrow is modest at 0.67%, essentially a freely available borrow, and availability in the lending pool has loosened materially this week. The ORTEX short score has eased from a peak of 69.6 on May 11 to 61.4 now — a retreat from elevated territory, though still pointing to meaningful bearish conviction relative to peers.
Options positioning sits just above neutral. The put/call ratio is at 0.52, a touch above its 20-day average of 0.50 — barely one standard deviation from the mean. That is well off the defensive extremes seen in mid-April, when the PCR hit its 52-week high of 0.64 amid broad market stress. The current reading suggests options traders are neither rushing to hedge nor piling into calls. Caution, not alarm.
The analyst community has been broadly lifting targets post the April 30 earnings print. Multiple firms raised their numbers while holding ratings unchanged — JP Morgan moved to $26 from $24, Evercore to $28 from $24, Barrington to $32 from $28, and Guggenheim to $34 from $29. The outlier is Rosenblatt's Barton Crockett, who upgraded to Buy with a $46 target — the highest on the Street and well above the consensus mean of $28. Citigroup kept its Sell rating but nudged its target up to $22 from $19. At $25.83, the stock trades below the consensus target, implying modest upside on a blended basis, though the dispersion between the $22 bear and the $46 bull captures exactly how wide the range of outcomes feels right now.
Valuation multiples are undemanding. The EV/EBITDA multiple is at 7.1x, down slightly over the past month. The PE stands at 8.2x, which has crept up 0.7 turns in 30 days on the back of the price recovery. The stock is up 8.9% over the past month despite losing 4.7% this week. The bull case — steady cash flow, debt reduction, potential regulatory tailwinds, and bundling innovation — sits alongside the bear case of structural subscriber erosion, EV headwinds to in-car distribution, and competition from Spotify and Apple Music that shows no signs of easing.
The dividend history in the data is stale, predating 2023, so no current yield read is reliable here.
Among correlated peers, the week has been broadly ugly. CHTR dropped 9.4% and CABO fell 21.8%, the latter suggesting sector-wide pressure on cable and satellite names. SIRI's 4.7% weekly decline looks contained by comparison, though the Berkshire news and the approaching earnings date are the variables that matter most for what comes next.
The May 28 print is now the focus — and the question is whether the business can demonstrate enough cash flow resilience to attract a new anchor holder into the register.
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