The Berkshire Beat: November 14, 2025
All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!
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On Monday, Warren Buffett converted 1,800 Class A shares into 2.7 million of the Class B variety — worth approximately $1.35 billion — and gifted them to four family foundations. This latest round of giving leaves Buffett with 196,317 Class A shares (and another 1,114 of Class B), good for about 29.8% of the aggregated voting power and 13.6% of the economic interest in Berkshire Hathaway.
Alongside this biannual donation, Buffett also gifted us with one last(?) letter to shareholders before his retirement at year-end.
“I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving,” he wrote. “Yes, even the jerks.”
Buffett said that he will be “going quiet” after handing the reins over to Greg Abel, but (thankfully) not quite as quiet as some of us feared. He announced that he will “continue talking to you and my children about Berkshire via my annual Thanksgiving message” because “I enjoy the chance to keep in touch with you”.
And if this one is any indication of how Buffett will handle his Thanksgiving letters in the future, we’re all in for a treat. Here, he deftly weaves heartfelt words of gratitude for his luck in life with funny childhood stories of fingerprinting nuns and inspiring paeans to Omaha-linked business leaders.
Obviously, everyone should read the whole thing. But, in this TL;DR world of ours, allow me to highlight three notable items that caught my eye…
(1) Warren Buffett seems to be in good health — all things considered.
After tipping his hat to the “huge dose of good luck” that spared him the illnesses, injuries, and other calamities that claimed so many of his peers, Buffett conceded that old age had indeed started to make its unwelcome presence felt.
“[Father Time] is undefeated,” he wrote. “For him, everyone ends up on his score card as ‘wins’. When balance, sight, hearing, and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood. I was late in becoming old — but once it appears, it is not to be denied.”
But, happily, it sounds like he might stay off that score card for a while yet.
“To my surprise,” he continued, “I generally feel good. Though I move slowly and read with increasing difficulty, I am at the office five days a week where I work with wonderful people. Occasionally, I get a useful idea or am approached with an offer we might not otherwise have received.”
(Another sign that aging weighs heavily on Buffett’s mind these days: He warns the Berkshire board to keep a careful eye on CEOs — both at subsidiaries and the parent company — for any indications of dementia or other mental impairment.)
(2) Buffett once again sang the praises of Greg Abel, who will soon take up the unenviable task of replacing a living legend. And reiterated that his successor plans to stick around for the long run.
Even though Buffett will be accelerating the pace of his charitable gifts to these foundations — to enable his children to give away the bulk (or all) of their father’s wealth in their own lifetimes — he has taken one pragmatic precaution.
To safeguard against his own voting power being cast to the wind too quickly, he will retain “a significant amount of A shares until Berkshire shareholders develop the comfort with Greg that Charlie and I long enjoyed. That level of confidence shouldn’t take long. My children are already 100% behind Greg, as are the Berkshire directors.”
“Greg Abel has more than met the high expectations I had for him when I first thought he should be Berkshire’s next CEO,” continued Buffett. “He understands many of our businesses and personnel far better than I now do and he is a very fast learner about matters many CEOs don’t even consider.”
Abel also sounds fully onboard with the Buffett and Munger approach to retirement. Namely, that it should come very late — if at all. “With a little luck,” wrote Buffett, “Berkshire should require only five or six CEOs over the next century. It should particularly avoid those whose goal is to retire at 65, to become look-at-me rich, or to initiate a dynasty.”
(3) No Buffett letter would ever be complete without a sprinkling of wit and wisdom aimed at helping shareholders lead better lives.
✨ “Our stock price will move capriciously, occasionally falling 50% or so as has happened three times in 60 years under present management. Don’t despair. America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.”
✨ “I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes — learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve.”
✨ “Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.”
✨ “Kindness is costless, but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.”
✨ “You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.”
And, now, on to other news and notes out of Omaha…
Later this afternoon, Berkshire Hathaway will reveal its Q3 2025 investment activity via a new 13F filing. Here’s what we know: Berkshire sold $6.1 billion of common stock (net) in the third quarter, making it twelve consecutive quarters that Warren Buffett and co. offloaded more stock than they purchased. Some readers of the 10-Q tea leaves think Berkshire might have trimmed its Apple and Bank of America stakes even further, but we’ll know for sure in just a few short hours. Because of the timing of this release, I will dive into any ins and outs of the Berkshire portfolio on Monday.
Apple is reportedly nearing an agreement to pay Google about $1 billion per year for the use of its artificial intelligence model in the next iteration of Siri. The iPhone maker views this deal as a necessary stopgap while its own AI models spend more time in the oven. Apple, which puts a premium on privacy well beyond its Silicon Valley peers, will run the licensed AI on its own Private Cloud Compute servers — ensuring that any user data remains out of Google’s hands. Although Apple would surely prefer to use a capable in-house option, sometimes the tortoise must accede to reality and hitch a ride with the hare.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber applauded the news. “If [Bloomberg’s] sources are right and this deal is for around $1 billion per year,” he wrote, “that’s an amazing deal for Apple. Remember first that Google pays Apple over $20 billion per year for web search traffic acquisition fees from Safari users. So one way to look at it is that Apple is getting access to its own private instance of Gemini in exchange for a 5% reduction in the fees it collects from Google for Safari search queries. Another way of looking at it is that Google has reportedly invested over $100 billion developing its AI capabilities. Apple getting access to the fruits of that labor for $1 billion per year seems like such a steal that it makes me wonder why Google agreed to it.”
Now, it’s time for our weekly dose of PacifiCorp-related bad news. S&P downgraded the beleaguered Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary to a BBB- rating, leaving it on the brink of losing investment grade status. PacifiCorp attributed the downgrade to the recent decision to accelerate the pace of wildfire damages trials in Oregon. S&P, meanwhile, hinted that the rating would have been even worse if not for the utility’s enduring value to BHE and the assumption that it will not be left to die.
And, finally, a few odds and ends to finish off the week…
This week, Berkshire collected $124.3 million in quarterly dividends from American Express, $72.8 million from Apple (unless more was sold in Q3), $13.7 million from Constellation Brands, $8.7 million from Ally Financial, $3.6 million from Nucor, and $3.1 million from Aon.
OxyChem update: “Due to continued softness in the global chloro-vinyl market, our third quarter OxyChem pre-tax income came in below guidance at $197 million,” Occidental Petroleum CFO Sunil Mathew said on this week’s earnings call. “We are guiding to $140 million for the next full quarter.”
In an era where data centers guzzle energy like there’s no tomorrow, Chevron has decided to step into the breach with an off-grid natural gas facility in West Texas to power one of these ravenous data centers for an unnamed client. The 2.5 GW facility will hopefully come on-line in 2027 — with headroom to expand up to an impressive 5 GW. “We’ve got the gas,” said CFO Eimear Bonner. “We are uniquely positioned to have a very competitive project.”
A little light weekend reading:
puts Warren Buffett’s new letter under the microscope, while is back with more Berkshire-related charts.