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.
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.
Q1 2026 was the first quarter in three years that both halves of GEICO's combined ratio moved against the company at the same time. Losses up 4.9 points on tariff-driven repair costs and bodily-injury severity. Expenses up 2.6 points on a 29% surge in policy acquisition spend. Half the story is hiding on the other side of the ledger.
Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group's first-quarter property-casualty premiums earned fell 6.2% as the group walked away from soft pricing — and on April 1, a ten-year whole-account quota-share with Tokio Marine switched on. A scholarly look at what these contracts mean and why disciplined reinsurers shrink in markets like this.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy's Q1 2026 net earnings rose just 1.3%, but underneath the headline three sub-segments rotated violently: U.S. utilities −16.1%, natural gas pipelines +24.2%, and the Other Energy group −26.5% on a Northern Powergrid tariff reset. The piece dissects what is one quarter's noise and what is structural.
BNSF moves 9.6 million carloads a year, paid Berkshire $4.4 billion in dividends in 2025, and is worth somewhere between $108 and $200 billion at peer multiples. The 32,500-mile network took 150 years and a string of bankruptcies to assemble. No one will ever build it again — and that is the moat.
Fifty years ago this spring, a 43-year-old actuary named Jack Byrne walked into a District of Columbia insurance company three weeks from the graveyard. What happened next turned a $4M morning stock order into a $2.4B half-stake and rewired Berkshire's identity for the next half-century.