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's Q1 2026 13F shows a $2.65B position in Delta Air Lines — its first airline stake since the 2020 exit. The number is small; the substance isn't. Delta in 2026 isn't an airline so much as a loyalty franchise that flies planes, and three Berkshire airline acts over thirty-seven years trace an evolution in what "investing in airlines" even means.

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.

In one calendar year Berkshire Hathaway closed two transformative deals — the full GEICO buyout for $2.3 billion and FlightSafety International for $1.5 billion — that quietly recast the conglomerate from an insurance holding company into a permanent operating-business home funded by the world's most productive float engine.

Greg Abel's first 107 days as Berkshire CEO produced a $9.7B chemicals deal, a $1.8B Japanese reinsurance stake, the first buyback since 2024, and a personal bet of his entire after-tax salary on BRK stock — all against the noisiest geopolitical backdrop in a generation. What the moves reveal about the next 20 years.

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.

From the 2013 Heinz buyout with 3G Capital to Greg Abel's January 2026 registration of all 325 million Kraft Heinz shares for sale, this is the full arc of Berkshire's most instructive capital allocation lesson — and what a divestment would actually mean.

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.

Dairy Queen turns 85 this year with 7,800 restaurants across 27 countries, a $6.4 billion system generating nearly $100 million in annual profit for Berkshire — yet it barely rates a paragraph in the annual report. From a 1940 soft-serve stand in Joliet, Illinois to a $10 billion growth target by 2030, this is the story of Berkshire's most delicious invisible subsidiary.