The Berkshire Beat: October 17, 2025
All of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!
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Tracy Britt Cool spent ten years working alongside Warren Buffett — and is probably best remembered for putting out occasional fires at Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries.
And, this week, a rare interview with Buffett’s one-time protege dropped over at The Knowledge Project podcast.
What started with a cold letter from Britt Cool to Buffett quickly snowballed into a decade-long stretch as a trusted member of the Berkshire inner circle, where she was often tasked with solving some of the thorniest problems facing the conglomerate.
In 2020, Britt Cool left Berkshire to co-found a new venture, Kanbrick, dedicated to investing in and acquiring midsize companies in need of a managerial helping hand.
During this new interview, she shared three of the most important lessons learned at the feet of Warren Buffett. But, she added, you don’t need firsthand experience working with the Oracle for his teachings to change your life.
“Warren is very gracious with his learning and his knowledge,” said Britt Cool, “and he shares it widely. He shares it at the annual meetings [and] he shares it in the annual letters. The lessons are timeless and they’re what he espouses relatively consistently through those maxims, which I think is great because everyone can learn from him.”
(1) The Value of Long-Term Thinking
The eighth wonder of the world is compounding. If you think long term and are set up structurally to think long term, there’s a lot of value in that.
(2) The Value of People
Find the right people with high integrity. People who care about what they’re doing and then giving them the right incentives and the right encouragement. Warren gave those people around him — his CEOs and others — really great autonomy and high expectations, but really let people have flexibility.
(3) The Value of Continuous Learning
Warren reads every single day — gets smarter, gets better. Those in the Berkshire ecosystem do the same. That was something that resonated with me from when I was a kid on the farm. My dad also focused on getting better and continuous improvement, in a different field, but it was something that I saw reinforced at Berkshire.
While Berkshire was something of a dream job for Britt Cool — and she even earned some buzz as a potential Buffett successor — she eventually stepped away in order to pursue another of her passions: Helping midsize companies, too small to even register on Berkshire’s radar, level up their operations and performance.
Berkshire is a phenomenal place. It’s unique. It’s one of a kind. I don’t think there will be another one, by any means. But Berkshire is very large in terms of capital. It’s hard to deploy capital. It’s [always] hard to find really great investments, but it’s also especially hard when you’re very large. So I saw this opportunity to help midsize companies with a long-term approach, with creating value.
As much as I loved my time at Berkshire and would have been happy there forever, it felt like there was this opportunity to create something new and special [at Kanbrick] that was serving a market that really wasn’t being served well.
And, now, on to the latest news and notes out of Omaha…
Okay, one last tidbit from the Tracy Britt Cool interview. She walked host Shane Parrish through one of her most famous rescue projects, The Pampered Chef. “When I started at Pampered Chef,” she said, “10% of the business was digital and 90% was sold in person through in-person parties. Employees didn’t even have laptops. And what we saw were customers shifting dramatically — shopping more online, shopping more mobile — and we’re selling through an in-person party model. We needed to be more digitally focused and we needed to shift our own thinking about technology from back office and support to a true revenue generator. We brought in a new leader who really transformed how we thought about technology — and how we serve the customer. We took the business from 10% digital to 75% [digital].”
Occidental Petroleum recently hosted a non-deal roadshow in which execs from the oiler shed new light on the decision to sell OxyChem to Berkshire Hathaway. (1) Occidental actually expects sustained pressure on chemical margins in the near term, driven by rising global capacity — much of which originates from China. (2) OxyChem accounted for around 20% of its parent company’s earnings a decade ago, but now contributes less than 10%. Over that same period, Occidental’s oil and gas production more than doubled. (3) The capital freed up from OxyChem can now be redirected to high-return areas like enhanced oil recovery in the Permian Basin, which offer attractive internal rates of return in the 25-35% range.
In other Occidental Petroleum news, CEO Vicki Hollub offered a measured outlook on falling oil prices at the Energy Intelligence Forum. She predicted that it will remain in a tight $58-62 range through next year — before possibly starting to climb higher. “[I am] very bullish on oil prices,” said Hollub. “Not this year or next, but I’m bullish on oil prices.” That optimism also extends to her own company, where she sees Occidental’s share price more than doubling in the next five years as it continues to convert debt to equity. And, for those weary of any more debt-laden deals, it sounds like the M&A era is over. “[Occidental] doesn’t need to do any more acquisitions,” she said.
Earlier this year, BNSF Railway launched bnsf | tech, a new division aimed at reclaiming the railroad’s roots in technological innovation — after years of relying on off-the-shelf solutions from external vendors. “With bnsf | tech, we’re sort of reversing that tide,” chief technology officer Hari Govind told Progressive Railroading. “Slowly but surely, we’re becoming more builders than buyers.” At the heart of this transformation lies artificial intelligence, which will power algorithmic optimizations across networks, routes, and locomotives. Among the innovations already producing results are drones for real-time tracking and inventory management, a mobile app that provides turn-by-turn navigation for truck drivers hauling freight out of BNSF terminals, and sensors deployed along tracks to monitor weather and wind speed. To bolster this effort, says Govind, “We just hired 100 engineers from state colleges in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida.”
Bloomberg reports that Apple plans to release a new lineup of smart home devices next year — including a central home hub and indoor security cameras. Notably, former Berkshire investee BYD has been chosen to oversee final assembly of these products, each of which will lean heavily on FaceTime cameras and the ability to seamlessly recognize users as they approach the display. This vision-centric approach dovetails neatly with a separate report from CNBC that Apple is in advanced talks to acquire Prompt AI. That company’s flagship app excels at identifying people, pets, and objects in home security footage — and then dispatching smart alerts with detailed descriptions of any detected activity. It’s not hard to see how Prompt AI’s talent and technology could play a big role in Apple’s rumored new home devices.
And a few odds and ends to finish off the week…
This week, Berkshire received over $230 million in quarterly dividends from Occidental Petroleum. That includes $63.6 million via its common stock position and $169.8 million via the preferred shares from the Anadarko deal.
GEICO significantly cut compute costs — “50% per compute core and more than 60% per gigabyte of storage” — by repatriating some of its cloud-based workflows to on-premises data centers powered by open source hardware and software. The auto insurer’s cloud bills had reached a staggering $300 million per year.
Duracell will launch six 400-kW electric vehicle charging stations in the U.K. this year, with plans for up to 100 locations in total by the end of the decade. The best part? These chargers will be styled as oversized Duracell batteries — complete with that iconic black and copper color scheme. No word yet on whether these beauts will make their way stateside.
Apple’s Services honcho Eddy Cue discussed the company’s streaming service with Deadline. “The service is doing fine,” he said. “We haven’t said what our numbers are, but we’re significantly more than [the reported 40-45 million subscribers]. We’re not going to say what our numbers are. We’re happy with where we’re growing [and] we’re trying to be successful.”
Oaktree Capital Management is celebrating 35 years of Howard Marks’s famous memos. And, in honor of the occasion, it has made the complete collection available to download as a PDF.
Thanks for linking to the Marks collection.
That complete Howard Marks collection is an absolute treasure.