The Berkshire Beat: August 7, 2026
This week's Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!
David Senra — who Fortune dubbed “your favorite billionaire’s favorite podcaster” — mines the life stories of business’s greatest exemplars for lessons relevant to us all.
He has devoted numerous episodes to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, but my favorite moments come when noteworthy guests freely admit just how deeply these two men — and Berkshire Hathaway — shaped them.
And, for some, that influence goes all the way back to childhood.
“I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela,” Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka recently told Senra. “It was November of 1987. I had read a few articles in Fortune about [Buffett] and I loved the brands he had in his portfolio. I didn’t know anything about float or insurance. I was not very familiar with that line of the business.”
Malka took his Bar Mitzvah money and convinced his grandfather to loan him the rest — with interest — to buy a single share. An opportunity only made possible because the previous month’s Black Monday crash knocked Berkshire’s (and many other) stock prices way down.
From there, Buffett’s annual letters became Malka’s real education. “If you read them carefully enough,” he said, “you know that the pattern repeats. What you learn is not the decisions he makes, it’s how in any environment he repeats the same decision-making process. That’s the most important thing that you get from [those letters].”
“It doesn’t matter if you were in the 1970s when there was high inflation in America compared to the standard [level] or in the era of zero interest rates. It didn’t matter what was the macroeconomic conditions of the world. He used the same pattern every single time to define how to think about money. It’s the discipline that he built. He just was amazing at canceling [out] noise and focusing on the things that matter most.”
Malka also shared an incredible story about the time he broke bread with Munger.
I sat with Charlie Munger once after an annual meeting at the Happy Hollow Golf Club where Warren had this thing afterwards. I [still] only had one stock of Berkshire — I was probably 24 years old or 25 — and I’m sitting and he says, “Is this seat taken?”
I said, “No, come on, sit here Charlie,” and we started to talk.
In that room was everybody. Bill Gates was there. All these big CEOs of all these companies. And I was like the youngest guy [there] by an order of magnitude.
He looks at me and says, “You must be very wealthy to be here.”
I said, “Actually, no, I only own one share.”
He said, “You don’t get it. You are the wealthiest guy in the room.”
I said, “You’re wrong, Charlie.”
“No, no, you are.”
“Why?”
“You have the power of time. All of us here are in our last chapter. You’re just starting your time. You will compound for the next seventy years of your life. So never forget the rule I’m about to tell you: You only need to get rich once.”
And, then, that was it.
He said, “Now, I’m going to eat,” and he just sat down and ate. 🤣
What a scene.
Charlie drops life-changing wisdom and then is like, “Show’s over, kid. I’m hungry.”
More news and notes from the Berkshire Hathaway orbit…
It’s that time again: Berkshire Hathaway will report Q2 2026 earnings bright and early tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. ET. There will, no doubt, be much to discuss — but my first stop will be the share repurchase page to see how aggressively Greg Abel fired back up the ol’ buyback machine. A back-of-the-envelope estimate from Barron’s puts this quarter’s repurchases as high as $11 billion. Even the lower end of the range — around $5 billion — would still dwarf the $235 million spent in the first quarter.
On July 31, Berkshire Hathaway sold 182,980 shares of DaVita for $36.5 million. While the filing does not explicitly mention the Share Repurchase Agreement between the two companies, this sale almost certainly stems from it. Per the terms of that arrangement, Berkshire promised to keep its ownership percentage under 45.0% of the dialysis provider’s outstanding shares. DaVita bought back 2.2 million shares of its own stock in the second quarter (plus another ~200,000 in July), necessitating this latest trim. Berkshire’s stake now rests at a carefully calibrated 44.98%.
Robert Hagstrom plugged his new 25th anniversary edition of The Warren Buffett Portfolio on last week’s episode of The 100-Year Thinkers podcast. And shared that the book was originally born out of his bewilderment at how often investors invoke Buffett’s philosophy without actually practicing it. “I would watch CNBC or the Financial News Network,” he said, “and somebody would say, ‘I like to buy great companies with great economics run by shareholder-oriented managers [and] we basically try to buy them for less than they’re worth.’ I’m thinking, well, that’s pretty cool. That’s the Warren Buffett way. And then you look at their portfolio and they would have 100+ stocks and the turnover ratio was 100%. Wait a minute, you’re talking the talk — how Warren thinks about buying stocks — but you’re not walking the walk. That was the motivation to write The Warren Buffett Portfolio.”
BNSF Railway appeared to have cleared the final regulatory hurdle for its $4 billion Barstow International Gateway — only to now face renewed legal challenges from environmental groups. In a lawsuit filed in San Bernardino County Superior Court, the coalition argued that California’s two-year environmental review, which BNSF already passed, was fatally flawed and must be redone. A puzzling objection, given that environmental benefits are among this project’s chief selling points. Allowing BNSF to load intermodal containers directly onto rail cars at the West Coast ports will eliminate millions of truck trips each year — and, with them, up to 75% of potential emissions. “None of this is good enough for the environmental groups,” says industry outlet Trains, “[who] seem happy to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. BNSF’s massive investment should be cheered, not held up in courts due to environmental regulations that, despite recent streamlining, remain overly cumbersome.”
Kraft Heinz sees “green shoots” as it accelerates turnaround plans. The company raised its net sales outlook for the full year and committed another $100 million to its North American revival efforts, bringing total spending in this area to $700 million. “Let me be clear,” said CEO Steve Cahillane, “we are increasing investments from a position of strength. Not because what we are doing is not working, but precisely because it is — and we intend to build on that momentum.” The new $100 million will go entirely toward rebuilding a marketing machine previously gutted by 3G Capital.
Worth noting: Kraft Heinz’s net sales “raise” is really just a smaller decline than originally expected. It now forecasts full-year sales to fall 0.5-2%, as opposed to the initial guidance for a 1.5-3.5% drop. “Nobody’s doing a victory lap here,” Cahillane told CNBC. “We still declined 1.3% in the [second] quarter. That’s a lot better than we’ve been doing, but we need to do better.”
Check back on Monday for a full review of Berkshire’s Q2 results!
What a great story: distilled Charlie. It's all about compound interest and the power of time. Exponential growth is humanity's blind spot and Warren and Charlie saw past it and exploited it and recommended it to everyone but only the wisest have obeyed!