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.

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.

Berkshire's first non-US deal closed seven days before a war broke out thirty kilometres from its main plant. Twenty years later — with Stef Wertheimer in the ground, two catastrophes survived, and the template re-run from Tokyo — the most revealing record of Iscar inside Berkshire is what Buffett didn't write.

Berkshire wrote two $9.7B checks for chemicals businesses fifteen years apart — one labeled specialty, one labeled commodity. Fourteen years of operating data, the May 2011 fairness opinion, and OxyChem's own segment record under Occidental let us ask which premium the market was actually right about. The data is unkind to the specialty narrative.

Clayton Homes sold 9.7% fewer houses in Q1 2026, yet its $29.8B loan book grew 7.8% and its credit-loss provision dropped 72% from a year earlier. The earnings centre is migrating from the factory to the finance arm — at exactly the point in the US credit cycle where captive lenders historically come undone.

On March 17, 2026, Clayton Homes debuted the TRU Mini — a 408-square-foot, one-bedroom manufactured home — against a backdrop where nearly three-quarters of Americans cannot afford the median new home. This piece examines whether Berkshire's $12.9B housing giant can dent a 4.7-million-unit shortage, and what makes the bet more defensible than it looks.

In early 1986, a one-paragraph letter to a Cleveland CEO bought Berkshire a $315 million conglomerate that would route more than a billion dollars back to Omaha in its first fifteen years. Forty years later, Scott Fetzer has been quietly absorbed into Marmon — but the archetype it established still defines what a textbook Buffett deal looks like.

Berkshire closed January 2, 2026 by absorbing Occidental's OxyChem chemicals business for $9.7 billion cash — the same headline price Buffett paid for Lubrizol in 2011. The deal carries an unusual lineage: Lubrizol's CEO Rebecca Liebert now also runs OxyChem inside Berkshire.

A two-page fax in 2005 bought Berkshire an RV empire. Nineteen years later, Pete Liegl died still running it — leaving Greg Abel a ten-billion-dollar subsidiary now facing 50% steel tariffs, four-dollar gasoline, and the highest RV loan rates in a generation.

We review Clayton Homes’ 2024 performance and future prospects through the lens of American innovation, from postwar factory-built housing to today’s modular revolution.