The Berkshire Beat: February 6, 2026

The latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!

This month’s Uncommon Sense article — which relates to Warren Buffett’s four-day trip to Europe in May 2008 — will go out to paid supporters early next week.

One of the key figures from that tour was Angelo Moratti, the Italian entrepreneur and investor, who (along with Iscar’s Eitan Wertheimer) arranged for Buffett to meet with family-owned businesses on the continent that he thought would fit in well at Berkshire Hathaway.

Anyways, while working on that article, I stumbled upon a new-ish Moratti interview that might be of interest to Berkshire shareholders. Last month, he spoke to Il Sole 24 Ore, a leading Italian financial daily, and briefly touched on Buffett’s recent market moves and what the future holds for Berkshire under Greg Abel.

Overall, Moratti struck a cautious, almost bearish, note about the market at large. He worries about elevated valuations, the risks surrounding artificial intelligence, and ballooning debt levels. And, at least in Moratti’s opinion, Buffett’s actions show that he is preparing for the worst, too.

“Buffett is giving very clear signals [of concern],” said Moratti, pointing to the large sales of Apple and Bank of America stock — and the resultant build-up of cash. “It is an extremely defensive position.”

(I don’t usually include other people’s opinions about what Buffett is thinking or feeling. It all seems like a lot of guesswork and projection. But, given Moratti’s decades-long relationship with Buffett, his words might carry a little extra weight.)

Setting aside any short-term concerns, Moratti remains supremely confident in Berkshire’s prospects during the post-Buffett era.

“The transition was very carefully prepared,” he said. “The new management acts exactly in the spirit of Buffett. All of his key people are still there and will continue a philosophy that has proven to be extraordinarily successful.”

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Other news and notes from the Berkshire Hathaway orbit…

Last week, Berkshire Hathaway sold 1.65 million shares of Davita for $199.9 million. While the filing does not explicitly mention the Share Repurchase Agreement between the two companies, this sale almost certainly stems from it. Under the terms of that agreement, Berkshire committed to keep its ownership percentage under 45.0% of the dialysis provider’s outstanding shares. Davita, a consistent repurchaser of its own stock, bought back 2.7 million shares in the fourth quarter (and another 1.7 million in the new year), necessitating Berkshire’s latest trim.

PacifiCorp laid out its case to the Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday, asking the three-judge panel to toss out a 2023 verdict that saddled the utility with many billions of dollars of wildfire-related liabilities. The Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary tapped high-profile appellate litigator Theodore Boutrous to lead the effort and centered its argument on two key points:

• The four wildfires should not have been grouped together into a single class action, since each was more than 100 miles away from each other.

• Non-economic damages (like emotional distress) should not have been awarded in addition to property losses.

“This was a tragedy,” Boutrous told the judges. “The question is how do we resolve these cases in an efficient manner? This was not the way to do it.”

Apple purchased Israeli startup Q.AI for close to $2 billion, which makes it the second-largest acquisition in company history behind Beats Music/Electronics. Q.AI reportedly focuses on translating subtle facial micro-movements into text or speech. Basically, allowing users to “mouth” words and converting that into actual speech. Apple never says much about its acquisitions, but this would obviously fit in well with its wearables business — be it future AirPods or the much-rumored Apple Glasses.

This is not founder Aviad Maizels’s first rodeo with Apple, either. He previously sold PrimeSense, which was later incorporated into Face ID, to the tech giant in 2013. “Joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we’ve created,” said Maizels. “We’re thrilled to bring these experiences to people everywhere.”

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth told the Grey Matter podcast what he hopes his legacy will be at the oil major. “I would want our people to [always] have an optimism about the future,” he said. “This is an industry that can be criticized often from the outside, but it’s an industry that is so essential to everything that we take for granted in the quality of life we have. There can be a lot of negativity around providing the fundamental commodity — energy — that enables a higher quality of life.”

“Our industry and our company has always innovated and found new solutions to continue to enable human progress,” he continued. “And that takes a spirit of optimism and confidence that we can do that — and that we will not only meet the needs of the world today, but we’ll meet the needs of the world of the future with new solutions. I would like to believe that, twenty years from now, our company will [still] have that spirit of optimism and innovation that carries us forward into a future where, undoubtedly, the criticism will still be there.”

In the same interview, Wirth also shared his own perspective on the tug-of-war between Chevron and Occidental Petroleum for Anadarko in 2019. Oxy, of course, eventually won out with the help of Berkshire financing. “It would have been a good deal for us at the price that we [initially] did the deal,” said Wirth, but he had no appetite for a bidding war with a company who saw Anadarko as “rightfully” theirs. “We never ultimately made a counteroffer.”

“It was probably the first really big decision I had to make in this role,” said Wirth. “And it wasn’t easy, because we liked the deal. But I also came in with a belief that our industry needed to demonstrate capital discipline — and that our company should be a leader in demonstrating capital discipline.”

“Most of my leadership team, when I had the final meeting and asked for their advice, said, ‘Let’s do this! We are a bigger company! We can win!’ And we could have outbid the other company and eventually they would have had to drop out. But we would have reinforced what I think investors found as their biggest criticism of our industry, that we would lose our discipline and pay any price to acquire volume and grow. The decision to walk away was really grounded in my fundamental belief and commitment to capital discipline.”

And, finally, a few odds and ends to finish off the week…

• Borsheims announced a major renovation coming later this year — with a new gold facade at its flagship Omaha location and an open-concept layout for “an elevated customer journey”. Construction starts after the Berkshire AGM in May.

• A former Kraft Heinz employee explains what 3G Capital got right — and wrong — in the aftermath of the ill-fated 2015 merger. A very interesting read that provides an insider’s perspective on 3G’s cost-cutting regime.

• NetJets expects to add more than eighty factory-new aircraft to its global fleet this year. And another fun fact: At least one NetJets flight lands every minute, all part of the 1,400+ worldwide flights that it operates each day.