Buffett/Berkshire - general news

[gfp]

2 hours ago, ValueMaven said:

@Munger_Disciple yea that would have been amazing for BHE!

 

I don't think Berkshire has ever been interested in these unregulated natural gas generation assets.  They have had many opportunities from the Enron days to today and never shown interest.  I still think the deal they were referring to was probably Skechers but we will have to wait for the next merger proxy to see if they shopped it around.

[Buckeye]

2 hours ago, ValueMaven said:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2025/05/13/japan/buffetts-little-japan-handbook/

Cool article @ValueMaven. Thank you for sharing.  It mentions that Mr. Buffett reaching out to an Andrew McDermott of Mission Value Partners for advice on investing in Japan. I’ve never heard his name before (not that that means anything). I’m looking forward to learning more about him. 
 

On a related note, Tobias Carlisle and Jake Taylor from the After Hours Podcast talked about on a recent episode (below), how they just returned on a trip from Japan, sounds like maybe to do some scuttlebutt.  They mentioned how the multiples were super low for some really great companies and how they were surprised that no one has tried to buy up some of these companies. 
 

Maybe buying companies outright is difficult because of the culture? 
 

It would be sweet if BRK was able to put a lot more capital to work in the country. It is my understanding that their manufacturing prowess is second to none. 
 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-acquirers-podcast/id1454112457?i=1000703428265

Edited May 14, 2025 by Buckeye

[dcollon]

This is not meant to be political at all.  I love the story about Warren helping the college a long time ago.  It's an amazing story if you don't know about it. 

 

Bloomberg: A Buffett-Backed College Faces GOP Tax Threats After Investment Success

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-14/warren-buffett-tied-iowa-liberal-arts-college-threatened-by-gop-tax-bill?srnd=homepage-americas

Edited May 14, 2025 by dcollon

[DooDiligence]

8 minutes ago, dcollon said:

This is not meant to be political at all.  I love the story about Warren helping the college a long time ago.  It's an amazing story if you don't know about it. 

 

Bloomberg: A Buffett-Backed College Faces GOP Tax Threats After Investment Success

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-14/warren-buffett-tied-iowa-liberal-arts-college-threatened-by-gop-tax-bill?srnd=homepage-americas

 

TBF, there's way too many artists, writers and musicians out there competing for attention. /s

[boilermaker75]

 

5 hours ago, dcollon said:

This is not meant to be political at all.  I love the story about Warren helping the college a long time ago.  It's an amazing story if you don't know about it. 

 

Bloomberg: A Buffett-Backed College Faces GOP Tax Threats After Investment Success

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-14/warren-buffett-tied-iowa-liberal-arts-college-threatened-by-gop-tax-bill?srnd=homepage-americas

 

 

Grinnell College is Robert Noyce's alma mater. I believe he made an initial large donation and his trust continues to donate.

[KPO]

11 minutes ago, boilermaker75 said:

 

 

 

Grinnell College is Robert Noyce's alma mater. I believe he made an initial large donation and his trust continues to donate.

Reminds me of this old classic article:  https://jasonzweig.com/a-golden-oldie-the-best-investor-youve-never-heard-of/#:~:text=By popular demand%2C I'm,investors%2C including his friend and

[boilermaker75]

@KPO Thanks, I had forgotten that Grinnell was an initial investor in INTC. I recall that the business plan Noyce and Moore sent to Arthur Rock was something like one page. 

[Munger_Disciple]

5 hours ago, dcollon said:

This is not meant to be political at all.  I love the story about Warren helping the college a long time ago.  It's an amazing story if you don't know about it. 

 

Bloomberg: A Buffett-Backed College Faces GOP Tax Threats After Investment Success

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-14/warren-buffett-tied-iowa-liberal-arts-college-threatened-by-gop-tax-bill?srnd=homepage-americas

 

Even Warren soured on Grinnell College, whose endowment he helped manage for many years. He said despite the excellent growth in the endowment, the college did nothing to reduce student fees, instead used the money to build palaces for themselves (I am paraphrasing).

 

This is true at almost all universities. Most of them don't give a crap about affordability and effectiveness of education. 

[BiggieCheese]

https://www.wsj.com/business/warren-buffett-reveals-he-stepped-down-after-finally-feeling-his-age-b060251f

[ValueMaven]

Does anyone know if this is little Japan book is for sale anywhere?  I'd love to get the most recent version and look through it

[fareastwarriors]

1 hour ago, ValueMaven said:

Does anyone know if this is little Japan book is for sale anywhere?  I'd love to get the most recent version and look through it

 

 

https://biz.toyokeizai.net/en/data/service/detail/id=859

 

https://www.amazon.com/Company-Handbook-Winter-英文会社四季報2024年冬号-Japanese-ebook/dp/B0CM8BD9D3

 

 

 

[John Hjorth]

Wall Street Journal - Exclusive, Business [May 14^th 2025] : Warren Buffett Reveals He Stepped Down After Finally Feeling His Age

Subtitle : The legendary investor, 94, opens up about his decision to hand the top job to Greg Abel; ‘How do you know the day that you become old?’

 

Some quotes from the exclusive interview, on which the article is based, which to me reads as very candid, honest talk and a great deal of self insight and introspection :

 

Quote

... “There was no magic moment,” Buffett, now 94, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “How do you know the day that you become old?” ...

 

... But as he passed his 90th birthday, Buffett began to experience something most people come to accept much earlier in life: his age. 

“I didn’t really start getting old, for some strange reason, until I was about 90,” he said by phone from his office in Omaha, Neb. “But when you start getting old, it does become—it’s irreversible.”

He began to lose his balance, occasionally, and sometimes had trouble recalling a person’s name. Suddenly, the newspapers he read looked like they were printed with too little ink. ...

 

...“The difference in energy level and just how much he could accomplish in a 10-hour day compared to what I could accomplish in a 10-hour day—the difference became more and more dramatic,” Buffett said. “He just was so much more effective at getting things done, making changes in management where they were needed, helping people that needed help someplace, but just all kinds of ways.

“It was unfair, really, not to put Greg in the job,” he added. “The more years that Berkshire gets out of Greg, the better.”

Few expected to hear those words in 2025. Many observers had thought Buffett might stay at Berkshire’s helm until he died. But Buffett said he never considered himself Berkshire’s CEO for life. ...

 

... “I thought I would remain CEO as long as I thought I was more useful than anybody else, in terms of being CEO,” he said. “And it surprised me, you know, how long it went.”

And while his days as the CEO are now numbered, Buffett said he intends to keep working. 

“My health is fine, in the sense that I feel good every day,” he said. “I’m here at the office and I get to work with people I love, that they like me pretty well, and we have a good time.” ...

 

... While Buffett acknowledged his advancing age has dulled some of his abilities, he said he still possesses what is perhaps his most-prized, and rare, talent as an investor. 

“I don’t have any trouble making decisions about something that I was making decisions on 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 60 years,” he told the Journal. “I will be useful here if there’s a panic in the market because I don’t get fearful when things go down in price or everybody else gets scared. 

“And that really isn’t a function of age.” ...

 

... “I’m not going to sit at home and watch soap operas,” he said with a laugh. “My interests are still the same.” ...

 

Personally, I'm good reading this. It is to me exactly like it should be.

[DooDiligence]

The man is graceful.

[Intelligent_Investor]

Sadly, father time is undefeated

[DooDiligence]

I'm remembered of the sad occasion when we had to stop my Mom from driving. I felt horrible for her. I hope Warren retains his awareness and reaction times enough to continue getting his own egg McMuffins in the morning.

[John Hjorth]

52 minutes ago, DooDiligence said:

I'm remembered of the sad occasion when we had to stop my Mom from driving. I felt horrible for her. I hope Warren retains his awareness and reaction times enough to continue getting his own egg McMuffins in the morning.

 

Yes, Jeff [ @DooDiligence ],

 

It's about to think about and for the best of the whole, with due regard for respect for the elderly.

 

For Mr. Buffett about driving, it would just be a question of a Berkshire Corporate HQ clerk picking him up at home in the mornings and driving him to  the office via McD, and also driving him directly home after end of his workday, or let his personal security take care of it.

[Dalal.Holdings]

22 hours ago, BiggieCheese said:

https://www.wsj.com/business/warren-buffett-reveals-he-stepped-down-after-finally-feeling-his-age-b060251f

 

Quote

 

Abel is the same way, Buffett said. While Abel’s assignment in recent years has been overseeing subsidiary companies, Buffett said he is also a successful investor. A buildup in Berkshire’s enormous pile of cash and Treasurys has drawn attention lately, as observers wonder where the company will find its next deal.

 

“He will have ideas about where money should be invested,” Buffett said.

 

 

This part of the article makes it seem like Warren is talking up Abel's ability as an investor...strange because Ted and Todd were supposedly going to be in charge of that. Or maybe he's saying Greg will be in charge of acquisitions

 

 

[Dalal.Holdings]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/buffett-would-be-worth-67-billion-more-than-musk-if-he-hadn-t-donated-it-all?srnd=homepage-americas

 

If Warren hadn't begun donating his wealth decades ago, he'd be worth close to $400B today (and rank #1)...

 

 

[oscarazocar]

2 hours ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

 

This part of the article makes it seem like Warren is talking up Abel's ability as an investor...strange because Ted and Todd were supposedly going to be in charge of that. Or maybe he's saying Greg will be in charge of acquisitions

 

 

 

Buffett seemed to say at the 2024 meeting that he more or less changed his mind about who would do the investing at Berkshire after he left and thinks it should be the CEO, see answer below.  I don't know that he's ever clarified this.

 

https://steadycompounding.com/transcript/brk-2024/

 

BECKY QUICK: All right, the next question comes from Slavin Vucelbrot. As CEO, will Mr. Abel be in charge of the portfolio of common stocks that Mr. Buffett has been managing, or will this function be exercised by Mr. Combs and Mr. Weschler? As investing could be defined as the discipline of relative selection, can major capital allocation decisions, such as large acquisitions, be separated from the common stock selection process?

 

WARREN BUFFETT: Yeah, I would say that decision actually will be made when I’m not around, and I may try and come back and haunt them if they do it differently. But I’m not sure the Ouija board will get that job done. So that job, I’ll never know the answer on whether it [will] get covered, but I feel very comfortable about the fact that it will be made by a board, that they’ve got loads of brainpower, they’ve got a dedication to an unusual institution, and they will figure things out.

 

But I would say that if I were on that board and were making the decision, I would probably, knowing Greg, I would just leave… I would leave the capital allocation to Greg. And he understands businesses extremely well. And if you understand businesses, you understand… you understand common stocks. I mean, if you really know how business works, you are, you are an investment manager. How much you manage, maybe just your own funds or maybe other people’s [funds]. And if you really are primarily interested in getting assets under management, which is where the money is, you know, you don’t really have to understand that sort of thing.

 

But that’s not the case with Ted or Todd, obviously. But I think the responsibility ought to be entirely with Greg. The responsibility has been with me, and I farmed out some of it. And I used to think differently about how that would be handled, but I think the responsibility should be that of the CEO. And whatever that CEO decides may be helpful in effectuating that responsibility. That’s up to [him or her] to decide at the time they’re running the money.

 

So I would say that my thinking on that has developed to some extent as the sums have grown so large at Berkshire, and we do not want to try and have 200 people around that are managing a billion each. [It] just doesn’t work. And I think that when you’re handling the sums that we will have, you’ve got to think very strategically about how to do very big things, and I think Greg [is] capable of doing that. I think I’ve missed a lot of stuff in the past, so I’m actually wiser about doing that now. But I, you know, I would do it better this time around in 2008 and 2009 if something akin to that happened. But it won’t be exactly like 2008 or [2009], you can be sure of that. But you also can say that there will be times when having huge sums available extremely quickly… Maybe it will be once every five years, probably [more like] once every ten years or something. But as the world gets more sophisticated, complicated, and intertwined, more can go wrong. And there’s no sense going through here exploring the possibilities of the different things that could happen.

 

But you do want to be able to act when [something] happens. And I think the chief executive should be somebody that can weigh buying businesses, buying stocks, doing all kinds of things that might come up at a time when nobody else is willing to move. It wasn’t that people didn’t have money in 2008. It’s that they were paralyzed. And we did have the advantage of having some capital and eagerness to act, and a government that, in effect, looked at us as an asset instead of a liability.

 

And I think that all of those qualities will be even more important as our capital pile grows. So I think Greg may have even more fun than I had in a period when extraordinary things were happening, and we were the logical place to go. You never know whether it’ll be next week, next year, [or the] next decade, but you [know], it won’t be a century from now, that is for sure. [The more] intertwined and sophisticated the world financial situation gets, the more vulnerable it gets in a certain sense. It solves a lot of small problems, but it leaves [the system] more vulnerable to large problems.

 

GREG ABEL: Without directly answering the question?

 

WARREN BUFFETT: Greg, does that bother you at all or not?

 

GREG ABEL: I think there’s one important thing, [and that] is I think as we go through any transition, it’s important to know that the capital allocation principles that Berkshire lives by today will continue to survive. Warren and I think that’s the thing I’d want to communicate. We have our operating businesses, insurance, [and] non-insurance, [and] we’re going to [support] that. We’ll provide them the capital necessary to be successful and grow, if it’s appropriate. At the same time, we’re expecting [a] return of capital from them when they have excess cash.

And then, as we’ve discussed, or you’ve touched on, always looking at potentially new businesses as a whole or in a piece, and as you’ve always highlighted, and I fully agree, it’s… we’ll always look at equities as [if] we’re investing in a business, either 1% or 100%, but we’re looking at the business, we’re looking at the economic prospects of that business, how sustainable it is, and what it will look like ten years from now. And is our capital… the capital we originally put in at exponential risk, or where’s that risk? Set that profile. And then, of course, and then we’ll obviously continue to always put excess cash in the safest investment there is in US Treasuries, knowing we want to maintain that fortress of a balance sheet for two reasons. One, to act, but also to always protect our shareholders if we have a… We want to maintain the position Berkshire is in now, realistically for the… To ensure it, to ensure it endures.

[Xerxes]

3 hours ago, Dalal.Holdings said:

 

 

This part of the article makes it seem like Warren is talking up Abel's ability as an investor...strange because Ted and Todd were supposedly going to be in charge of that. Or maybe he's saying Greg will be in charge of acquisitions

 

 

I think it was last year AGM where Buffett clarified that Greg would be the end all capital allocator. 
 

One man, one ring, one mission 

[Rainier]

Apparently Berkshire requested 13F confidentiality on one of its purchases. Any speculation on what it might be?

[gfp]

13 minutes ago, Rainier said:

Apparently Berkshire requested 13F confidentiality on one of its purchases. Any speculation on what it might be?

I’m on a plane but I’ll check the insurance filings for clues later. They are usually pretty good about hiding confidential purchases inside a vehicle called “Harney Investment Trust” - what’s the point of seeking confidential treatment if it’s just gonna come out in a day or two anyway 

[Malmqky]

3 hours ago, gfp said:

I’m on a plane but I’ll check the insurance filings for clues later. They are usually pretty good about hiding confidential purchases inside a vehicle called “Harney Investment Trust” - what’s the point of seeking confidential treatment if it’s just gonna come out in a day or two anyway 

 

Looking forward to hearing about what you find!

[KPO]

4 hours ago, Rainier said:

Apparently Berkshire requested 13F confidentiality on one of its purchases. Any speculation on what it might be?

One company that I’ve always thought would be interesting for Berkshire to own either partially or in total is ITW.  They have a fairly consistent record of free cash flow growth, have retired about 35% of their shares in the last 10 years or so, and have a conglomerate like structure Buffett would appreciate. The only issue is it seems pretty much fully valued presently. 

[mistakenpoint]

In the latest 10Q, the increase in cost basis of the consumer products section can be explained by the increase in stake of Constellation Brands. So the confidential company should be in the Commercial, industrial and other category. Will run some screen to make a guess.