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Maybe it will look a little like Apple after Jobs. New guy comes in and drains the excess capital on share retirement, the company doesn't grow to the moon but the price per share does. Everyone lives happily ever after

The shares are neatly destined for charity. Warren will have essentially never sold a share and it all goes back to society. The money is inside the shares and going to charity. A dollar of cash is valued at more than a dollar inside Berkshire according to the market price that has persisted, whether it is 1.2x, 1.5x or whatever. A dollar inside Berkshire is a buck-fifty and just a lowly taxable dollar outside berkshire. It's like robbing the poor kids in Africa and the ladies trying to find a planned parenthood that's still open!

I would be shocked if they paid a dividend before Warren passes. Once his shares are in the foundations they can pay dividends all they please. Does that policy make sense for all shareholder? Maybe not. But you can sell BRK stock any time you want at a premium to book value per share and a cash dividend is worse than that.

They bought the tiny LULU position on 9/3 for $200.44 per share! Not the best timing buddy

Odyssey Re's Q3 NAIC filing is attached for the nerds FFH_Q3_2025_23680.2025.P.Q3.P.O.3.5042652.pdf

Someone should ask them about it on a call but I have always assumed they have some younger managers at Hamblin Watsa that manage small pools of capital and those are their positions.

Fairfax 13F for Q3. Gradually selling down Blackberry https://www.dataroma.com/m/holdings.php?m=FFH

"out of the gate they will have..." They don't even own an insurance company yet! It's pretty easy to pencil something in on a powerpoint. Assuming 20% on the stock portfolio of the mystery insurer going forward is similarly nutty. I'm sure Warren, Ajit and Prem wished it was as easy as putting your target combined ratio in the powerpoint. Right next to your forward equity market returns

Yeah I get a lot of my AI and Bitcoin thoughts from listening to Jordi every week. He keeps me from getting too bearish, which is my default state of mind apparently

My sense is that the Bitcoin market finally got big and liquid enough with all this newer institutional capital for some huge early investors who made billions of dollars to cash out, much like an IPO provides liquidity to the exiting early investors. I heard you can still make some money buying IPOs but it takes some time to absorb the supply from the expiring lock-ups sometimes...

I did it again! I got some more of those Bitcoins you guys are always talking about!

Some of the younger members of this board probably don't remember that Berkshire stock actually goes up from time to time

Billy Ackman with a plan for Donald ->

that's exactly right. All his shares will be sold, none will be sold by him, and he has modestly accelerated the process. If he lives a couple more years, we should see all his shares converted and sold by 12-15 years from now. (it will be hard to hit the 10 year thing exactly so there is probably some leeway there) Much like interest rates aren't set by the supply of government borrowing, I don't think Buffett's shares coming into the market will be the defining factor on Berkshire's trading price. Index weightings will gradually increase as the "free float" increases. Berkshire will repurchase shares. The stock will trade on its merits as an investment.

Aren't you guys mixing up non-controlling interests for just their insurance subsidiaries with non-controlling interests for those insurance subsidiaries plus all the other consolidated companies they have a 50.1%->99.9% ownership interest in?

Not gonna happen. The future of Berkshire is going to look a lot like the recent past. Occasional deals like OxyChem that make sense but everybody yawns about. Bolt-ons at the operating subsidiaries. Plenty of appetite for capital expenditures to fund internal growth opportunities if any can be identified by the managers. Odds are that the market gets real bored of Berkshire and it trades low enough to repurchase meaningful amounts of its own shares. "Problem" solved.

yeah I don't think that is what is happening or proposed.

I think the A shares do not end up getting "unlocked" - I think between a combination of the one-way convertibility, Buffett's strong suggestion to long-term holders to convert before donating or offer blocks to the head office, and Berkshire's activity to repurchase A-shares despite their limited liquidity - the A-shares will continue to slowly disappear. I don't see the A-shares as being the way a future "activist investor" disrupts Berkshire (demanding a break-up, dividend, etc) Warren knows where a lot of the tightly held A-shares are.

It's just a voting defense against a potential "activist investor," not something based on concerns from other A-share holders. It would be very difficult to win a vote at Berkshire that Buffett didn't support and that has been the case for basically the entire time. Even though his voting control is down around 30%, he still has de-facto control of the company. The A-shares are mostly locked up and illiquid, so there is not real opportunity for an activist to accumulate a useful voting position.

Thanks Hoodlum, that's a great excerpt and the book sounds really promising. Surely this is a typo and they meant Canadian Dollar "By the time the stock passed that level in January, 2024, the stock was in full sprint, reaching US$2,000 before the end of the year. "

I believe the context of this statement is what to do/feel when Berkshire's stock price falls by 50% or so, as has happened previously. Not a comment on the current state of affairs with stocks near all time highs and Berkshire too overpriced to repurchase.

I haven't seen any notes from before the 2013 meeting and certainly no video clips. I think Charlie used the Wesco annual meeting and annual letter to "hold court" before, say, 2011 or so... The groupies probably hadn't swarmed the DJCO meeting yet and it was probably a quiet affair. Good luck in the hunt https://www.bishoprockcap.com/library/charlie-munger https://worldlypartners.com/charlie-munger-archive/ Munger super-file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxTPR9eP5nWeeXd6X3hjMy1pZDg/view?resourcekey=0-sntz0S-p35zMkhf0pD8M-Q

I doubt it - there has been no indication that Fairfax in interested in changing their TRS position and the counterparties have long since hedged their exposure

This growth of the stock portfolio can't be used to calculate equity CAGR or investment performance of any kind. It includes new capital coming in and asset allocation decisions between asset classes.

Fairfax specifically might not have much exposure to the auto insurance business but other insurers (Berkshire for example) do, and this area is likely to be disrupted relatively soon compared to other areas of insurance. I still think the messy middle period where some drivers are AI and some are human is a lot messier and longer lasting than most people are penciling in. The same AI-led disruption that we are talking about is going to impoverish a ton of people. It isn't an age of abundance for all individuals. For workers comp claims it sounds like they are referencing humanoid robots and other specialized AI agents that will replace human workers in the labor force. People who think AI is just large language models stringing convincing sentences together in some kind of chat-bot parlor game are missing where the frontier of AI is today. Forget about 18 months from now or 5 years from now. I think things like humanoid robots replacing humans in the workforce is going to progress slower than, say, Elon Musk - who described humanoid surgeons being better than human surgeons as some kind of near term certainty. All this stuff takes longer than people think. But completely autonomous robo-taxis are very close and those will be the first big bang that wakes a bunch of people up to vision based AI robots. That's what a self driving tesla is after all. A robot that uses cameras to see.