The Berkshire Beat: March 14, 2025

All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!

Happy Friday and welcome to our new subscribers!

Special thanks, too, to those who recently became paid supporters! ❤️

Back in 1997, Warren Buffett delivered a masterclass on the importance of brands — using his favorite company as an example. “75% of the people on the globe have some notion in their mind about Coca-Cola,” he told Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “The word Coca-Cola means something to them … and, overwhelmingly, it’s favorable.”

“It’s associated with pleasant experiences. Part of that is by design. I mean, [Coke] is where you are happy. It’s at Disneyland and Disney World. It’s at ballparks. It’s every place that you’re likely to have a smile on your face — including the Berkshire Hathaway meeting, I might add.”

“It’s share of mind that counts,” he finished.

I was reminded of these comments while listening to Pilot’s chief marketing officer Adrienne Ingoldt discuss the process of building the travel center network’s brand on a recent episode of the Adweek Marketing Vanguard podcast.

“We have the scale, the size, and the infrastructure to really be an iconic brand,” she said. But, up to this point, Pilot had mostly focused on B2B and “never really prioritized marketing and branding in its truest sense, so we are just at the beginning of our brand journey”.

Ingoldt — the first-ever CMO in company history — believes that this will help Pilot “rise above its commoditized category” and become something of a consumer brand in its own right.

It was her comments on Pilot’s “See You Out Here” brand campaign that brought Buffett’s Coca-Cola example to mind. “It’s aimed at fueling the journey with that upbeat experience of being out on the road,” she said. Pilot’s consumer research showed that people enjoy driving because it makes them feel alive — and excited to see what might be around the next bend in the road. So the company hopes to lean in on the joyful nature of exploration and travel.

“Brand is not a product,” said Ingoldt. “It’s not an offer. It’s not a service. It’s a feeling. It’s a visceral connection that humans have with everything that you say, that you do, how you show up in every touch point.”

To that end, Pilot continues to refresh the aesthetics and amenities of its travel centers as part of the $1 billion New Horizons initiative — as well as adding EV chargers so as to better serve customers in a fuel agnostic way.

“During the time I’ve been here [at Pilot],” said Ingoldt, “we actually went through an ownership change. I was hired under prior ownership because they saw a market need … to start thinking about marketing in a bigger way, but last year we became fully owned by Berkshire Hathaway and — with the backing of Berkshire — have really accelerated our growth in this area.”

---

---

And, now, the latest news and notes out of Omaha…

Proxy incoming? If recent history is any guide, Berkshire Hathaway will likely release its annual proxy statement later this evening. (And I, for one, cannot imagine anything more exciting than reading through an SEC filing on a Friday night.)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Berkshire is “in advanced talks” to sell its real estate brokerage unit — HomeServices of America — to Compass. It’s not every day that Berkshire sells one of its subsidiaries — but it’s not completely unheard of, either. In 2021, Berkshire sold the Kirby Company (which was part of Scott Fetzer) to Right Lane Industries — and, a year earlier, it sold the Buffalo News and other wholly-owned media publications to Lee Enterprises.

• One thing to keep in mind: HomeServices of America came over as part of the MidAmerican Energy acquisition in 1999. So Warren Buffett never sat across the table from the brokerage’s founder and promised to keep it forever. If this story is true, that might help explain why HomeServices is not off-limits for a sale.

• Way back on March 3, Chicago Agent Magazine first mentioned that the “rumor mill is abuzz” about Compass buying HomeServices.

• In an email to staff, HomeServices CEO Gino Blefari denied the whole thing. “No such sale is being contemplated,” he wrote.

Despite Occidental Petroleum hitting fresh 52-week lows in recent days, Warren Buffett has not added any more shares to Berkshire’s stockpile. Speaking of Oxy, though, CEO Vicki Hollub told attendees at CERAWeek that using carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) was paying off across the company’s portfolio of assets. “In conventional,” she said, “we’ve gotten up to more than 75% of the oil in the reservoir out using CO₂.” (It probably would be less than 50% if no CO₂ were used.) And, in terms of shale, Oxy has already conducted pilot tests for CO₂-powered oil recovery. “What the pilot tests indicate,” said Hollub, “is that we can double our recovery of oil from the shale.”

• The first phase of the Stratos DAC facility is still on schedule to become operational this summer. The 250,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide sucked out of the atmosphere each year will either be permanently sequestered underground (per carbon credit agreements with corporate customers) or used in EOR. A planned second phase will double the amount to 500,000 metric tons annually.

• Hollub also expects domestic oil output to peak in the coming years. “We think that between 2027 and 2030, it’s likely that the U.S. will see peak production and, after that, some decline.”

Kansas City Magazine named 91-year-old Barnett Helzberg Jr. — the man who sold Helzberg Diamonds to Berkshire — to its “9 Over 90” list. I previously wrote about how Helzberg’s serendipitous meeting with Warren Buffett on the streets of New York City led to Berkshire’s acquisition of the company. “That moment still gives me goosebumps,” Helzberg told the magazine. “This is my typical luck. We were at the point where we were ready to sell the business — and that’s kind of scary, because somebody could wreck it.” Which, of course, made Berkshire the ideal forever home. Helzberg marched up to Buffett and introduced himself — and his company. “It was so simple and very different from how other people do those types of acquisitions. There were no gimmicks, no tomfoolery. It was pretty unbelievable.”

• “I always said [the diamond business] is a perfect business because you’re looking at beautiful merchandise and then you’re helping these people to be happy and express themselves,” said Helzberg. “So, to me, when you compare it to other businesses, it’s really a good place to be.”

  • So good, in fact, that Barnett struggled to strike the right work-life balance back when he was running the company. “I didn’t balance family and work,” he said. “I had a lot of good times with my boys, but I don’t get a reward for balance.”

• In retirement, Helzberg founded the University Academy K-12 charter school in 2000 — which achieved prestigious National Blue Ribbon status in 2017. “We don’t want to get you in college,” he said. “We want to get you out of college. So we started a thing called the University Academy Foundation. We follow up and keep in contact with the kids. It’s really helped. And these are kids that are poor kids. In a lot of these homes, they don’t even have one book.”

Dividends: This week, Berkshire collected $202.8 million in quarterly dividends from Chevron, $23.2 million from Moody’s, and $1.6 million from Louisiana-Pacific. Each of these companies recently increased its dividend payout.

“When I see memos from Howard Marks in the mail,” Buffett once said, “they are the first thing I open and read. I always learn something.” I can’t think of a better endorsement than that. Marks released a new memo last week — Gimme Credit — in which he tackles the credit market and current yield spreads. The whole thing is well worth a read, but I’ve pulled out a few of my favorite lines down below.

Last week — in classic Friday news dump fashion — Apple delayed its big Siri upgrade. One of the most anticipated features of Apple Intelligence had been the promise of a more personalized and intuitive Siri that could sift through other apps (like Calendar, Mail, Messages, etc.) to better serve you. For example, you could ask Siri, “When is my mom’s flight landing?” and she would zip through the apps on your device to locate and present the necessary information. That, now, will not be coming as an update to iOS 18 — with just a vague comment from Apple that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year”. If Steve Jobs were still around, heads would be rolling.

• John Gruber at Daring Fireball unleashed a scathing take on the whole situation.