The Berkshire Beat: October 10, 2025

All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!

Happy Friday and welcome to our new subscribers!

In the wake of Berkshire Hathaway’s $9.7 billion deal for OxyChem, Business Insider caught up with some fellow Warren Buffett obsessives to get their thoughts on the agreed-upon acquisition. One comment, in particular, caught my eye.

Brett Gardner, author of the excellent Buffett’s Early Investments, dubbed it a “win-win” for both parties. And with Berkshire continuing to hold a 26.9% stake in Occidental Petroleum, how it could it be any other way?

Berkshire scooped up a durable cash-flow machine at a good price — everyone seems to agree on that — while Occidental shed billions in debt, giving CEO Vicki Hollub the balance sheet breathing room to revive her share repurchase program.

From Berkshire’s perspective, the importance of those impending buybacks cannot be overstated. The deal brings OxyChem at arguably trough pricing, while simultaneously freeing one of Berkshire’s biggest holdings to get back on track with returning capital to shareholders.

And, according to Mohnish Pabrai, that’s exactly what Berkshire wants out of an oiler. Charlie Munger reportedly once told him that they would love to invest in O&G companies as long as “they would do no more cap-ex and they would simply run all the [oil] fields with the cash flows going to the shareholders. He had calculated that it would be a tremendous investment. And, of course, oil companies don’t think that way. But Oxy thinks that way.”

It all comes back to how Buffett views the two different avenues of investment: (1) act boldly to snatch up bargains from Mr. Market when he starts behaving erratically, but (2) prioritize fairness over “steals” when buying whole companies. A fire-sale price for OxyChem might thrill in isolation, but it would weaken one of Berkshire’s biggest investments and erode confidence in its leadership.

When you own 26.9% of your counterparty, you either win together or hang together.

✨ Speaking of win-win deals, that’s my overriding goal for paid subscriptions here at Kingswell — with a steady stream of valuable content to make all of us better investors and thinkers. This month’s Uncommon Sense article will go out to paid supporters on Monday. I think all of the Peter Lynch fans in the crowd will really enjoy this one. So, if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, there’s no time like the present. Plus, you’ll gain access to the full archive of annotated transcripts and Uncommon Sense articles.

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

Alex Morris, author of Buffett & Munger Unscripted, shared some of the lessons he has learned from the dynamic duo during a recent interview with Big Think. “Avoid stupidity,” he said. “Avoid the first step on a bad path. It applies to life — steering clear of destructive habits like gambling or addiction. It applies to business — avoiding bad deals, bad leverage, bad incentives. So much of success isn’t about brilliance. It’s about avoiding unforced errors. Buffett and Munger built careers on discipline and restraint — waiting for the fat pitch, resisting fads, preserving optionality. That mindset is immensely powerful.”

• “They were disciplined realists,” added Morris, “but also optimists. They believed in progress, in the compounding power of good decisions, in America’s potential. That combination — skeptical of nonsense but optimistic about the future — is part of why they endured. Optimism without discipline is dangerous. Discipline without optimism is paralyzing. Buffett and Munger managed to hold both.”

Berkshire Hathaway continues to move the final pieces into place ahead of its historic CEO transition at year end. On September 30, the conglomerate’s board voted to formally separate the roles of CEO and chairman — which have both been held by Warren Buffett for decades. This clears the way for vice chairman Greg Abel to take over as CEO, while allowing Buffett to remain in place as an elder statesman of sorts and sounding board for any large acquisitions in the future. Moving forward, these roles will remain separated — with Howard Buffett slated to step in as non-executive chairman after his father hangs it up for good.

Yesterday, Mitsui announced that Berkshire Hathaway is now its largest shareholder with 10.12% voting rights. Berkshire (via National Indemnity) owned ~292 million shares of the Japanese trading house as of September 30. That’s an increase of approximately 6.6 million shares over the past six months.

On the subject of succession, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman tabbed senior vice president John Ternus as the most likely candidate to be the next CEO of Apple. Tim Cook, who turns 65 next month, has not given any indications of an imminent retirement — but Gurman believes he will eventually make a Buffett-like transition out of the CEO hotspot and into chairman of the board. For years, COO Jeff Williams was seen as the heir apparent, but he announced his own retirement earlier this year. That leaves Ternus as the new odds-on favorite. He joined Apple in 2001 and has steadily climbed the ranks ever since — overseeing design and engineering of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in recent years. Perhaps the biggest sign of his rising star came last month when he was the public face of the brand-new iPhone Air.

• What sets Ternus apart are his deep roots in technology and engineering — a welcome pivot from the operations-centric pedigrees of both Cook and Williams. Cook’s tenure has been a masterclass in scaling Apple’s empire, revolutionizing global supply chains to churn out millions of cutting-edge devices each year. But many feel that the company has stumbled in the innovation department since the Steve Jobs and Jony Ive era. Ternus might bring that technical spark back.

According to Reuters, Chevron is exploring the sale of pipeline assets in the Denver-Julesburg Basin for more than $2 billion. These assets generate approximately $200 million in EBITDA annually — and came over to Chevron as part of the Noble Energy acquisition. The oil major has enlisted Bank of America to drum up interest and canvas the market for suitors and bids. That said, nothing is set in stone — and Chevron could still ultimately decide to retain these assets if the price isn’t right.

• At an internal town hall meeting earlier this week, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth bullishly predicted that the Hess acquisition will surprise to the upside. “In our last number of acquisitions that we’ve done,” he said, “once we’ve closed the deal, we actually find more value. I fully expect the [Hess] deal will meet and exceed what we’ve committed [to] externally.”

GEICO named Arianna Orpello its new chief marketing officer. She will report directly to CEO Todd Combs and joins the auto insurer at an especially pivotal time — as it emerges from a profit-first retrenchment and re-enters growth mode. In the first half of this year alone, GEICO spent $550 million on U.S. measured media, a 15.5% boost over the previous year.

Kraft Heinz CMO Todd Kaplan explained the art of brand building at Advertising Week New York. “Brand building is a bit like pointillism,” he said. “Every time you activate your brand, you’re placing a dot in somebody’s brain.” The challenge, though, is to shepherd those scattered impressions into a unified vision, lest they dissolve into irrelevant noise. “If you have a consistent brand architecture, you can tell multiple different stories … but it all needs to ladder back to that same brand idea.”

And I’ll leave you with this bit of wisdom from Warren Buffett on the critical importance of trust in business. “I like to deal with people where I feel a one-page contract will do the job,” he said. “If I have to have 50 pages in there to protect me against the guy I’m dealing with, I’ll always wonder whether I needed 51.”