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.
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.
Berkshire Hathaway votes down every ESG shareholder proposal and publishes no conglomerate-wide sustainability report. Yet its subsidiaries have poured $38 billion into renewables, retired 22 coal units, and built some of the most progressive supply chains in American manufacturing. The real ESG record hides in plain sight — in the 10-K.
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.
As Warren Buffett steps down after six decades, Greg Abel takes the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, a $1+ trillion empire. We analyze Abel’s fit as CEO—highlighting his deep operational expertise, Buffett’s mentorship while also weighing potential pitfalls like his lesser-known investment prowess and the daunting Buffett shadow.