The resonance of Berkshire Hathaway
I don’t remember when it started, but sometime in the 2010s, I started losing my hair. It accelerated during Covid and then came the occasional clothes purchase at Costco. Time went by and I had a kid, and Birkenstocks spoke to me. This is who I am now.
Today, I’m 35 and staring squarely into middle age, and nowhere is this more evident than in one small detail: I’m a shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway.
You probably know the company. Once a middling textile manufacturer in Massachusetts, it’s morphed into a holding company over the last 60 years. Its investment track record made once-CEO Warren Buffett the richest man in the world.
As of this writing, the company is valued at one trillion dollars if you believe the stock market. As for what it’s really worth—its intrinsic value—that’s for you to decide. That’s the Berkshire way.
I’m not here to offer investment advice. It’s none of my business what you do with your money. Talk to an expert. I’m talking about Berkshire today for one reason only: the vibe.
In a frenetic world of meme stocks, prediction markets, and Robinhood tomfoolery, Berkshire is unique to the point of being bizarre. Try to research it through financial media, and you’ll find yourself lost in AI-spewed nonsense and outright fraud. Ask a search engine and you’ll receive a mountain of clickbait like “5 Must-Have Stocks Buffett Would Buy Today.”
If you do the ancient thing, however, and go to the company’s website, you’ll be surprised how easy it is to find information. It’s a stark experience.
The Berkshire website is straight out of the 90s, and it’s hasn’t changed meaningfully in decades. I checked. Here’s the original capture from the WayBack Machine in 1997.
A trillion dollars and a site you could build with a day’s worth of HTML knowledge. It’s not optimized for mobile, which is itself a statement. The archetypal Berkshire investor probably doesn’t even have a phone. Resonance.
If you somehow made it onto the site from your Commodore 64, you’d be delighted by what you found. It’s just text and a list of links. They point directly to annual reports and SEC filings. Good luck finding other companies that link directly to regulators from their homepage.
There are sacred texts in the form of shareholder letters dating back to 1977, which I imagine have been scraped and some bro will hawk back to us as a flimsy BuffettAI. The letters are a warm, enlightening read that is out of time as if Grandpa wrote you every summer to teach you about capitalism.
There’s not much shilling to speak of on the site. No cookie banner. No in-your-face pop-up asking you to pee in a cup. There’s a banner ad at the bottom, if you want to call it that, for GEICO, the insurance company Berkshire owns that made much of this possible. The presentation is innocent by today’s standards.
Scroll up to the top, not with your thumb but with a mouse. Click and hold that bar off to the right, or hit the PgUp button on your keyboard. We’re in a browser, remember?
Sweet, an address in Omaha, Nebraska. You can send a letter here, and it’ll find its way between the cornfields. I’ve never been to Omaha but from what I know, it’s somewhere in middle America and home to the College World Series. The perfect place for the unassuming.
This weekend, tens of thousands of people descend upon the city for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. It used to be a ritual where Warren Buffett and his partner in capital allocation Charlie Munger would sit for hours and speak directly to shareholders.
This year marks a new era, the first meeting without either principal driving the discussion. Munger passed away in 2023. Buffett handed over the CEO reins to Greg Abel last year at the age of 95. Good for him. FIRE works.
In any case, the meeting should be interesting. CNBC will livestream it here on Saturday. Expect bald heads and neck collars.
Abel has big shoes to fill and I don’t know what he’ll say. These are strange times and Berkshire is not without criticism. Many have accused the company of being too set in its ways and missing out on the momentum of tech in recent years. For instance, Buffett had a notable disdain for something that also starts with “b”, the price of which outperformed Berkshire so far this century.
Staying in your lane is healthy—Berkshire has spent a lifetime doing it—and some lanes are generational. We’ll see what the new guard brings.
I’ve been thinking about Berkshire lately, especially its no-frills, no-fuss brand. There’s something captivating to me about a nondescript corporate entity, and it’s more than a fetish for stationery. The older I get, the more I value substance over style.
Low tech minimalism goes a long way. I find myself seeking it out nowadays. My Honda Pilot may not impress the kids with their Cybertrucks, but whatever, it gets the job done. Like me, Berkshire is behind the times, and some times are worth being behind.
We can learn a lot from older generations, starting with how sane and humble they are. If we went back 95 years to when Buffett was born, the field of public relations was just beginning. There’d be no talk of followers. You wouldn’t have a personal brand. Instead, you’d have a reputation in your community, one that began and ended with your actions—the intrinsic value of who you are.
That’s what matters. Brands can be simple and free from all pretense. When you’re truly yourself and excellent at what you do, there’s nothing to sell and no market to manipulate. It can be the most boring, normcore vibe on the planet. People notice if it’s built to last.
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