The Berkshire Beat: June 27, 2025
All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!
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Speaking of which… The annotated transcript for June will go out to paid subscribers on Monday morning. Nothing like getting it in right under the wire.
It’s a Warren Buffett speech from the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit in 2018. Think of it as Buffett’s take on a commencement address — delivered to a room full of ambitious entrepreneurs who “graduated” from the program.
Charlie Munger was the undisputed master of the commencement address — with his iconic talks at Harvard-Westlake School (1986) and USC Law School (2007) pretty much the stuff of legend. Buffett, though, never really hit the cap-and-gown circuit — instead preferring smaller sit-downs with business school students.
That’s what makes this one so special. It’s about as close to the real thing as we’re probably ever going to get. And, seeing as this speech was aimed at entrepreneurs, Buffett dives deep into two particular examples that we could all learn a lot from.
So, if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading, there’s no time like the present.
Now, with that bit of housekeeping out of the way, let’s move on to the latest news and notes out of Omaha…
Barron’s named Warren Buffett one of its Top CEOs for 2025 — a fitting honor in his final year of eligibility. “Buffett hates meetings and bureaucracy,” writes Andrew Bary, “and runs a decentralized company. Among the few regular items on his calendar is a haircut. He views every Berkshire share as precious and won’t issue stock as employee compensation. Everyone at Berkshire gets paid entirely in cash. Buffett has thrived into his mid-90s on a diet heavy on Coca-Cola, steaks, home fries, and ice cream. Berkshire holders are happy that he plans to be in the office every day in 2026, in the role of chairman.”
And Berkshire Hathaway itself was also honored as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies of 2025. “Investment trends have come and gone over the years, but Berkshire Hathaway has stuck with a simple idea: buy undervalued companies and invest in them for the long term. The strategy helped Warren Buffett build a struggling New England textile company into a behemoth that reached $1 trillion in market valuation in 2024, one of just a few non-tech companies to ever reach that value … Its successes prove long-term investing can lead to huge wins.”
CNBC’s Inside Wealth recently caught up with NetJets president Patrick Gallagher to discuss the Berkshire-owned business. Founded in 1964 in Columbus, Ohio, NetJets revolutionized the private charter jet industry with a shared ownership model in 1986. “We’re very proud of the fact that the very first share owner is still flying with us today,” said Gallagher. “The aircraft that he bought a share of back then is no longer around, but he’s still flying with us.” He credits the company’s “100% focus on safety and service” for such loyalty among owners. When you take care of those two things, market share and customer retention have a way of taking care of themselves. “The ultimate luxury is the absence of worry.”
Gallagher sees no signs of slowdown ahead for NetJets. The sales cycle might be taking a little longer than in past years, “but volumes haven’t suffered at all”. One bullish sign is that the younger rich are drawn to NetJets because they’ve grown up in the sharing economy and prefer this model to owning their own private jet (and all of the costly maintenance and upkeep that comes along with it).
Being owned by Berkshire is a big plus, too. “We’re proud to be part of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998,” said Gallagher, “and I would tell you that it’s also what I consider a key differentiator of NetJets. You don’t just want safety in the air, you also want security of your investment — and that’s an important part of our value proposition.”
Last week, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub told David Rubenstein about Berkshire’s investment in her company — from helping to finance the Anadarko acquisition in 2019 to its current 28.2% ownership position. Hollub revealed that she meets with Buffett each quarter after Oxy reports its earnings, especially noting his enduring enthusiasm for the oiler. “The good thing about the Berkshire investment is that they view it to be for the long term,” she said. “[Warren] is bullish on oil prices and he loves the Permian Basin.”
Back in April, Hollub admitted that it would be “a dream come true” if Berkshire acquired the rest of Oxy. But, when Rubenstein asked her if she really expects that to happen, she shook her head: “I don’t.”
At a recent meeting of the Private Motor Truck Council, manager Dale Howard of Pilot Flying J shared some insights into the company’s recruitment and retention strategy. “Every day is driver appreciation day,” he said. “We don’t pick a week and give a guy a ball hat and a hot dog and hustle him out the door because he’s late [for work].” Instead, Pilot strives to make its drivers feel like the most valued person in the room — a gesture that costs the company nothing but makes a big impression on those employees. In the hiring process, noted Howard, attitude trumps experience. He prefers to hire people who have never hauled fuel before so they can be exclusively trained in the “Pilot Flying J way”.
While Pilot’s main line of business caters to truck driver customers, it also employs a fleet of drivers to transport fuel to the company’s vast network of travel centers. And, with a costly onboarding process to consider, Pilot wants only those committed for the long haul. “When I hire a driver,” said Howard, “I like to tell them this is the last job they’ll ever have.”
And a few odds and ends to finish off the week…
Today, Berkshire will collect $164.2 million in quarterly dividends from Bank of America (assuming Buffett hasn’t sold any more shares in recent months) and $130.3 million from Kraft Heinz.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the increasing number of recalls and breakdowns at Berkshire-owned Forest River. Of interest to me, the article notes that the company “now sells more than 100,000 RVs a year on average and generates more than $6 billion in annual revenue”.
JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy 50,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal credits from Occidental Petroleum’s STRATOS direct air capture facility — which is still set to come on-line later this year.
Berkshire acquired Marmon Holdings in 2008 from the Pritzker family — and, now,
has embarked on a momentous effort to comprehensively document that family’s business empire. It fittingly starts with the man who Rockwood credits with laying the foundational ethos for the family’s later success, Nicholas J. Pritzker.Michael Gregory over at MSN wrote about the investment categories that Warren Buffett tends to avoid — including things like IPOs, cryptocurrency, and gold. “Buffett didn’t become one of the world’s richest men by chasing trends. He built his fortune by saying ‘no’ to the wrong things and sticking with boring investments that actually worked.”