The Berkshire Beat: March 28, 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! ❤️

Speaking of which… The annotated transcript for March will go out to paid subscribers on Monday. (I’m getting this one in just under the wire.) This month’s transcript comes from a joint interview with both Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger — in which the pair field questions about their friendship and careers. It aired on CNBC as “Buffett & Munger: A Wealth of Wisdom” back in the summer of 2021.

I love this bit of back-and-forth from near the end of the interview:

Munger: We have accidentally created a very interesting experiment in how well a really big place can be run on a very non-bureaucratic basis with extreme decentralization. We’re like a test case for how extreme you can make it. And I would say — so far — that it has worked better. We get more advantages than disadvantages out of our hands-off management.

Buffett: That’s true.

Munger: Don’t you agree with that?

Buffett: That’s true. We get very few people who want to copy us, but — (Laughs)

Munger: Nobody wants to copy us. If people study us, they’d find that the way we’re doing it, it works way better.

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…

Guy Spier chatted with Big Think about his 2007 charity lunch with Buffett — and the biggest lesson he learned there. “It was around dessert when I realized that this guy was not trying to be the best investor of his generation,” said Spier. “This guy was trying to live his happiest life — and it so happened that his happiest life was spent reading annual reports and 10-Ks and 10-Qs. It was a kind of psychotherapy for me because it really allowed me to give something up — which I didn’t want to give up — the dream of being better than Warren Buffett.”

• He also recommended that any aspiring investor make the pilgrimage to Omaha. “The best thing that somebody can do is to come to the Berkshire meeting,” said Spier. “If you get around the right people, you’ll learn everything you need to know.” And, for those learning from home, he named Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Lowenstein) and The Snowball (Schroeder) as must-reads.

Buffett practically begged someone to finally win the company’s March Madness contest this year — and he got his wish. An employee of FlightSafety International correctly predicted 31 of 32 first-round games — bringing home the million-dollar grand prize under this year’s slightly relaxed rules. “I feel good that we sort of hit the sweet spot on this one,” Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. Owing to an opening weekend without any bracket-busting upsets, there were actually twelve Berkshire employees with 31 right — forcing a tiebreaker (the number of correct picks in a row to start the tournament) to settle the matter. The others will receive $100,000 a piece.

• When asked about his own bracket, Buffett admitted that someone else filled it out for him. “I don’t follow sports like I used to,” he laughed. “I hope I haven’t forgotten as much about business as I’ve forgotten about sports.”

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ISCAR Metalworking founder Stef Wertheimer passed away this week. He started the Israeli tool-making company in 1952 — before selling it to Berkshire, more than five decades later, for $6.05 billion in two stages. Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, hailed Wertheimer as “a man of industry, vision, and … one of the builders of the state and a pillar of Israeli industry. [Stef] left behind a legacy of initiative, giving, and abiding faith in the power of humanity to create and to do good.”

Berkshire’s AGM is now just five weeks away — so check out this year’s Shareholders Guide for all the important details. As usual, questions will alternate between in-person shareholders and Becky Quick of CNBC — who will sift through thousands of submissions for those that “she believes will have the widest interest”. Send your best ones to berkshirequestions@cnbc.com.

• The Q&A session will be a bit shorter this year, but Buffett promises that he will “promptly” start fielding questions after a “few introductory remarks” at 8 a.m. Central Time. He will be joined by vice chairmen Greg Abel and Ajit Jain in the morning session. After the break, it will be just Buffett and Abel. So, if you have an insurance-related question, get it in early!

  • “The three of us will not get so much as a clue about the questions to be asked,” says Buffett. “We know you and Becky will pick some tough ones and that’s the way we like it.”

  • Two subjects, though, are off-limits: (1) Politics, and (2) What Berkshire is buying or selling. “Even if the information is public,” says Buffett, “we do not discuss how we arrive at our decisions.”

BNSF Railway reaffirmed its commitment to build the $4 billion Barstow International Gateway. Executive Director Lena Kent told the crowd at the High Desert Economic and Real Estate Symposium in Victorville, California, that the railroad “is really going to build” the massive intermodal facility after all. Happier news than last year, when Kent dropped the bomb that the project was in danger due to California Air Resource Board regulations. CARB ultimately withdrew the offending rule after BNSF threatened to pull out of the project altogether. This “once in a lifetime legacy project” will become North America’s largest intermodal facility — handling freight from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Did you know that Berkshire owns a television station? WPLG in Miami, Florida. Unfortunately, this summer, the station will lose its affiliation with ABC after the Disney-owned network cut a separate deal with Sunbeam Television Group. “WPLG is proud we’ve not had layoffs [like other television stations],” said CEO Bert Medina, “but it became clear that, if we accepted the deal ABC was proposing, we too would have been forced to lay off employees in order to pay the hefty price the network was demanding.” WPLG will, instead, double down on local content. “Instead of sending our money to New York,” said Medina, “we will keep it in our community and use that money to finance a massive expansion in local news and other local programming.”

And a couple of odds and ends to finish off the week…

• Berkshire hit more all-time highs this week — with its Class A shares breaking through the $800,000 barrier for the first time ever on Wednesday. I’ll have more next week on Berkshire’s high-flying stock price once we get final Q1 numbers.

• Dividends keep rolling into Omaha. This week, Berkshire collected $130.3 million in quarterly dividends from Kraft Heinz and $176.9 million from Bank of America (assuming, of course, that Buffett hasn’t sold any more BAC 0.00%↑ shares).