While Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern chase an $85 billion merger to build America's first single-line transcontinental railroad, Berkshire's BNSF answered on June 17 with something harder to replicate: a $4 billion approval to build the Barstow International Gateway. The story of why concrete beats combination — and what it means for America and for Berkshire.
Thirty years after Berkshire bought FlightSafety International, the pilot-training company has outlasted two shocks that gutted the airlines — September 11th and COVID — because a working pilot must requalify twice a year no matter the cycle. A look at the moat, the capital wall, and the compounder that vanished into a footnote.
Forty years ago this June, Warren Buffett bought a uniform maker he'd never heard of, in a city he never visited, on the strength of a letter from a stranger. Fechheimer Brothers is the purest specimen of the Buffett acquisition method — and, at Berkshire's current $727 billion scale, a deal the company can no longer bring itself to do. We trace Fechheimer's 40-year slide from a named earnings line into corporate silence using two primary-sourced charts, then show why Greg Abel's first letter as CEO — lamenting that a rodent-control business "had been ten times bigger" — proves the method survives even as its original scale became impossible.
In June 2026 catastrophe-reinsurance prices fell the fastest in over a decade and Berkshire wrote less — exactly as it did in reverse after Katrina. A look at the counter-cyclical discipline you can measure, and why the float still hit a record $176.9 billion.
See's Candies cost $25 million in 1972 and has since generated nearly $2.8 billion in cumulative pre-tax earnings on barely $65 million of invested capital. But its real return was intellectual: the laboratory where Buffett and Munger discovered economic goodwill, the concept that enabled Coca-Cola, GEICO, and every great investment that followed.
The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index leads GEICO's loss ratio by approximately twelve months because auto insurance rate filings can't adjust fast enough. The index turned up in late 2025 — the same signal that preceded GEICO's 2022 $1.9 billion underwriting loss. But the scale is different, and bodily-injury severity is the bigger wildcard the index cannot forecast.
Precision Castparts was Buffett's most public mistake — a $10.6B write-down and a rare mea culpa. A decade on, Berkshire's foundry has quietly set revenue and profit records. We model the locked demand behind it and argue the bottleneck has moved inside.
In the same week Berkshire wired $10 billion into Alphabet, its own utility was already selling Google the electrons in Nevada. One bet is a casino chip on the AI narrative; the other is a toll road on the buildout. Only one of them is durable — and BHE's last internal mark prices in neither.
Greg Abel told shareholders BNSF ranks fifth of six Class I railroads on efficiency, and that closing the gap to Union Pacific needs "a fundamental step change." His chosen lever is not the PSR scalpel that reshaped the industry — it is software. A look at what an AI railroad actually does, where BNSF lags its peers, and the defect its inspection AI has been told not to find.
For twenty-two years Berkshire owned only the bottom rung of American housing — Clayton's factory-built homes. Greg Abel's first big deal as CEO, the $8.5 billion Taylor Morrison acquisition, buys the move-up rung at a $597,000 average price. Berkshire now spans the entire housing staircase — and is paying below the homebuilder peer group to do it.