Subject: Re: Some Thoughts - Maybe Too Many
So, I wonder – as I mentioned in a post some time back about a long lunch with a BRK friend – if maybe we’ve about talked BRK “out”?

I'm late to this, and possibly alone in my sentiments, but it seems to me there are more unknowns around Berkshire, and more interesting questions to discuss, than there have been in years.

Mr. Buffett just turned 94. We have discussed succession for so long it's as if the subject is exhausted, except now it's actually happening.

The new CEO will be an operations man. That is pretty much the exact opposite of the founder/current CEO, who famously ran a corporate office of fewer than two dozen people and practiced a management style of benign neglect or, as Mr. Munger put it, decentralization, almost to the point of abdication.

How do things change with an operator at the top? Does oversight of Berkshire's scores of wholly-owned businesses increase? Is there a process of culling some of the performance laggards that would be unthinkable under Mr. Buffett?

Is it possible that all the recent selling of Apple and BAC shares is not only for the usual reasons, company-specific or valuation, but clearing the decks and building up the cash hoard to provide maximum optionality to new leadership?

Is it possible that once the investor founder has departed, investing in public equities ceases to be a significant use of company funds?

What don't we know? What kinds of plans might Mr. Abel be developing over this extended transition period?

There has been some discussion that wildfire liability has rendered BHE uninvestable, but electric transmission and utilities are only one sector of the energy infrastructure space. What about generation? A new deal is announced seemingly every day to build new capacity that acres of prospective hyperscaler data centers will require. They're re-opening Three Mile Island with Microsoft as the sole customer! Is it possible Berkshire under Mr. Abel is poised to make major investments in this space?

Berkshire has been run the same way for so long, and there is so much respect, internally and externally, for the partners who ran it that way, that there is a tendency to think it will continue to be run generally in the same way. The history of iconic founders moving on suggests that seldom happens.

I am intrigued by what Berkshire will look like a decade from now. I hope to live to see it!