The Berkshire Beat: September 18, 2026

This week’s Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news!

This morning, Warren Buffett handed the chairmanship of Berkshire Hathaway over to his son, Howard, and stepped into the role of Chairman Emeritus. Warren remains on the Berkshire board and, presumably, will continue to come into the office every day and stay heavily involved with the conglomerate’s stock portfolio.

In a letter to shareholders appended to the press release announcing this move, Buffett indicated that Greg Abel’s ascension to CEO has worked out so well that it was time to finish the job by ushering in Howard as chairman. “[Greg] has taken hold of the Chief Executive Officer job in every respect,” he wrote. “He has been making the decisions that matter for some time now, and I have not had to think twice about any of them. So the timing is right to complete the transition.”

“Greg runs the company,” he continued, “[and] Howard will guard its culture and values — both worth more than anything on our balance sheet. Think of Howard as a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against.”

CNBC’s Becky Quick, a close friend of Buffett’s for two decades now, framed the moment as the long-planned culmination of Berkshire’s succession and added, “I think [Warren] feels really good about where things are right now.”

The Financial Times dropped an oral history of the Salomon Brothers bond-trading scandal — including never-before-published quotes from Warren Buffett himself. Writer Richard Dewey spoke to many of the key players and reconstructed the whole saga from Berkshire Hathaway’s emergence as a white knight in 1987 to help fend off Ronald Perelman’s takeover threat to Paul Mozer’s illegal Treasury auction bids and, finally, Buffett’s desperate scramble to pull the investment bank back from the brink.

“Our name was rat poison,” said Buffett, which pushed him to embrace radical transparency as the firm’s best option. Disclose everything before you’re asked. Hand regulators the ugliest facts before they have to dig for them. Cooperate past the point of comfort. In many ways, Buffett wrote the template for the modern corporate crisis playbook here — and did it purely on gut instinct.

Basically, he just told the truth faster than anyone could accuse him of hiding it.

“Being at Salomon was like flying in a war,” said Buffett. “You wouldn’t want to do it again and there’s a lot of ways it could have turned out much worse, but you’re thankful for the experience.”

Speaking at a Japan Foreign Trade Council press briefing, Itochu chairman Masahiro Okafuji once again mentioned Berkshire’s continued interest in the five trading houses. “Berkshire does not nitpick the trading houses’ activity,” he said. “While Berkshire currently owns about 10% of the trading houses, the company indicated it would not make a fuss even if those stakes were raised to 15%. As a shareholder, that makes Berkshire extremely valuable to us.”

The appeal, according to Okafuji, comes down to fundamentals Berkshire has long prized: durable moats, extensive global networks, and disciplined capital allocation.

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Apple must be thrilled with the reaction to iPhone Duo’s unveiling. The “Surprise and Shine” event pulled in 49+ million views on YouTube alone, the Duo dominated internet conversation all week, and influential tech reviewer MKBHD said its fit, feel, and finish “mogs” every foldable Samsung has ever shipped.

(If you don’t speak Gen Z, “mog” is a good thing.)

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman was even more effusive. “Apple’s iPhone Duo will go down as one of the company’s historic products,” he wrote, “eventually turning foldable phones into the new normal.” Today, foldables account for just ~2% of the global smartphone market, though that will likely change for the better once Duo releases.

This is all very Apple. The company rarely shows up first — it didn’t invent the smartphone, tablet, or smartwatch — but does tend to show up best.

Despite the fact that Gurman writes almost exclusively about Apple these days, he’s certainly no cheerleader. He’s been openly critical of the company’s AI strategy and the Vision Pro headset. So when he compares the Duo’s reveal to the visceral jolt of seeing the iPhone or iPad for the first time, that feels pretty bullish to me.

According to Barron’s math, Precision Castparts — the subsidiary Buffett wrote down and admitted he overpaid for — might now be worth much more than its $37 billion purchase price. I’ve mentioned a few times before that turbine blades — the fiendishly precise, brutally-hard-to-manufacture components PCC specializes in — have suddenly become very hot commodities due to a red-hot aerospace cycle colliding with the AI boom’s insatiable appetite for natural gas turbines to power data centers.

As a result, companies are racing to bypass bottlenecks and runaway prices by building in-house. SpaceX already announced its own push in that direction and, last week, GE Aerospace went one better with the $11.75 billion acquisition of Consolidated Precision Products. A deal Barron’s pegs at 26x next year’s EBITDA.

Apply that same multiple to Precision Castparts and you land around $100 billion on the open market. Nearly triple what Berkshire paid for it a decade ago.

Now, to be fair, none of this really matters. We’re talking about the earnings multiple others would pay for a company that ain’t going anywhere. Berkshire doesn’t flip subsidiaries based on the whims and manias of Mr. Market. PCC will be judged on its underlying business results — which have rapidly improved in recent years — and not something as ephemeral as estimated auction prices.

BNSF Railway CEO Katie Farmer told the crowd at the Intermodal Association of North America EXPO that persistent speculation that her railroad needs to acquire CSX in response to the Union Pacific x Norfolk Southern merger should be seen as proof that said merger is anticompetitive. “People continue to ask me the question: Will we go out and acquire CSX if this merger goes through? Why are people asking me that question? What it tells us is that they recognize that if this consolidation is allowed to go through, it [will] create a competitive dynamic that’s not sustainable.”

She added that it’s better for BNSF (and the railroad industry) to spend billions on growth projects like the Barstow International Gateway rather than on swallowing up one of its Class I rivals.

Kraft Heinz has a lot of fires to put out these days, but none bigger than the one at Oscar Mayer. “If you look at the share losses that we’ve had this year through the first half of the year,” CEO Steve Cahillane said at the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference, “60% of them are in Oscar Mayer alone.”

The culprit, as it turns out, was packaging that frequently failed to reseal properly — leading to wasted food, frustrated customers, and a slow bleed of shelf space that the company is now scrambling to win back. Kraft Heinz rolled out redesigned packaging last month, which seems to be working. Albeit slowly. “The declines have lessened,” said Cahillane. “You have to get to ‘not as bad’ before you get to good.”

Oscar Mayer could also use a new image in our increasingly health-conscious world. “Oscar absolutely has the right to go [in a healthier direction],” he said. “Making [it] less perceivably processed is not going to hurt the brand. It’s going to help the brand.”

And, finally, a few odds and ends to finish the week…

• HomeServices of America released new research showing that 87% of recent homebuyers want a consolidated real estate experience, as opposed to being fragmented across a half-dozen different companies that barely talk to each other. “As the only residential real estate enterprise in North America that supports consumers from their first home search, through mortgage, title, homeowner’s insurance, and loan servicing, it’s clear that we bring a unique value proposition to the industry,” said CEO Chris Kelly.

• Vance Bell is back as Shaw Industries CEO after the sudden departure of Tim Baucom. Bell originally succeeded co-founder Bob Shaw in 2006, handed the company over to Baucom five years ago, and now steps out of the chairman’s seat for a second stint atop the flooring giant. “Shaw has a strong position in the market,” he said, “and significant opportunities ahead.”

• Mark Tobak over at Hedge Fund Alpha uses the words of Buffett, Munger, and even poet Dorothy Parker to make the case that index funds — an enduring bet on business writ large — are the wisest choice for most investors, since individual companies will always rise and fall due to the brutal nature of capitalism.