The Berkshire Beat: December 26, 2025
All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!
In Warren Buffett’s recent Thanksgiving message to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, he mentioned the late Tom Murphy’s 1995 interview with Charlie Rose as one that everyone really should watch.
And, with an endorsement like that, how could I choose anything else for this month’s annotated transcript?
I just need to put the finishing touches on said transcript — and then it will be ready to go out to all paid supporters early next week.
The interview focuses on the landmark sale of Capital Cities/ABC to The Walt Disney Company, but also provides an invaluable window into the mind of the manager who Buffett called the best to ever do it.
Murphy, in turn, had nothing but admiration for Buffett.
[Warren] is the smartest fellow that I [have ever met]. He’s got a great ability of simplification. If I were around him all the time, I think I might have a major inferiority complex — because he would always get to the right answer so much faster than me.
He can see over the horizon, too. Every one of us could have invested in Coca-Cola when he did. He has probably made $4-5 billion on it. He tells the entire world what he does — but no one seems to be able to copy him. He says to buy the best businesses you can that are run by the best people you can find to run them. He tells everyone that and they say, “Yeah, okay,” and then they want to go for a quick buck someplace and they don’t do as well as he did.
So, if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, there is no time like the present.
(Plus, you gain immediate access to the growing archive of paid-only transcripts and articles. A little light reading for the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s.)
More news and notes from the Berkshire Hathaway orbit…
Nima Shayegh, a protege of the late Lou Simpson, made a rare podcast appearance on the latest episode of Richer, Wiser, Happier. He worked closely with Simpson at SQ Advisors and learned a great deal from the former GEICO investment chief about the kind of detached and calm mindset needed for success in the money game.
I was particularly struck by Nima himself — and the incredibly thoughtful, almost philosophical way that he approaches investing. “From the very beginning,” he said, “investing felt like the ultimate kind of intellectual adventure. It was this microcosm where you could practice your discernment and your creativity and your temperament and your reasoning. And you got this objective feedback loop, which was so appealing. You could professionally pursue your natural curiosity.”
Shayegh also touched on how the study of history equips us for an uncertain future, the critical importance of a business’s qualitative “roots”, embracing volatility and the inevitability of occasional underperformance, and building an investment operation that will endure for the long haul.
“Investing, at its core, is an act of perception,” he said. “It’s about seeing beyond the narratives and what the news is talking about and what other investors are talking about to try to grasp the essence of a business. What is it that actually makes it tick?”
Perhaps the most profound lesson Shayegh learned from Simpson was the power of balance — and how a well-rounded life can actually sharpen your edge as an investor.
Lou lived a pretty balanced life in the years that I knew him. He would read broadly. He had this amazing sense of humor. He would make it a priority to exercise. In the mornings, he would go for a long walk or he would go for a swim.
I remember on one occasion — it was in the middle of the week and the market was open and I think our portfolio was probably down quite a bit that day — and he called me up and said, “There’s this new exhibition at [a museum] in Chicago. Do you want to go with me?” I said, “Great!” and we just spent the afternoon wandering around, looking at art. This is very different from the kind of experience that you might have at many investment firms.
If you’re constantly sprinting and you’re always wired and reactive to every little data point and you’re just staring at ticks on a screen, maybe that will help your results for the next month or two months or six months — but over the long term it will completely destroy your health. It will destroy physical and mental health.
It will strain your relationships. And, ironically, it will make your investment decisions worse at some point. It’s sort of perverse that the harder you push, the harder you try at investing, the shorter your runway.
In the end, compounding is all about the number of years. So creating space in your life is something that I learned from Lou and something that’s invaluable. So much of modern investing is preparing a memo or updating a model. There’s so much reactivity and so little time is intentionally devoted to reflection.
It’s not intuitive for most people to think that going for a walk may be better for your portfolio than adding another scenario to your Excel model.
BNSF continues to rail against the Union Pacific x Norfolk Southern merger. The two railroads laid out their case for the merger in a 6,700-page filing with the Surface Transportation Board late last week — but BNSF CEO Katie Farmer ain’t buying it. “While we are still reviewing the STB filing and will have more to say soon,” she said, “what we have seen so far does not change [our] opposition to the proposed merger.”
Farmer added that the deal “poses a significant threat to the U.S. economy and the American consumer” leaving shippers with fewer options and thrusting higher prices onto customers. She pointed to the STB’s own rules that any merger must actually enhance competition — and not merely preserve it. “BNSF is confident that UP has not met these requirements,” said Farmer. “UP has a long history of making promises in past mergers that they back away from once they’ve secured approval.”
And a few odds and ends to finish off this quiet holiday week…
Alphabet will acquire Intersect, a specialist in data center and clean energy infrastructure, for $4.75 billion in cash (plus assumed debt). This deal — expected to close in the first half of 2026 — promises to bring “multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects in development” into the Google fold.
Berkshire Hathaway will find a couple of belated Christmas presents under its tree this morning: $159.1 million in quarterly dividends from Bank of America and $130.3 million from Kraft Heinz.
A parting thought from Todd Wenning of Flyover Stocks: “Looking back on our investing careers years from now, our biggest winners won’t be $1 bills that we paid 50 cents for, only to sell it when the market eventually priced it at $1. It’ll be the $1 bills that turned into $5, $10, $50, and so on. Companies that are creating long-term value by building useful products, and solving problems.”