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.
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.
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.
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.