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Draw your own conclusions...

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/00...

There have been no additional redemptions of the preferred shares in quite a while.

These recent purchase were made with "new" money.

Draw your own conclusions.

Draw your own conclusions...

$0.6 billion in a week, not a trivial addition.

Seems consistent with one prior theory: "I'll buy as much as I can at under $60 a share. Until I have a better idea, anyway."

Jim

"I'll buy as much as I can at under $60 a share. Until I have a better idea, anyway."

He recently paid as much as much $63.05 a share - 12% higher than the recent batch of shares ($56.16/share) - so apparently $60 is not a hard line.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/00...

Would seem he sees significant margin of safety at current share price levels.

Would seem he sees significant margin of safety at current share price levels.

Probably so.
Given the amount of monetary inflation since the buying began, around 10%, paying $60 isn't as much to give up as it used to be, either.

Jim

And then there are the 83,858,848 warrants to purchase common at $59.62/share, which upon exercise would increase Berkshire's ownership significantly.

Mr. Buffett at the annual meeting in May of this year:

“We will not be making any offer for control of Occidental, but we love the shares we have,” Buffett said. “We may or may not own more in the future but we certainly have warrants on what we got on the original deal on a very substantial amount of stock around $59 a share, and warrants last a long time, and I’m glad we have them.”

https://buffett.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/08/afternoo...

Draw your own conclusion as to what will transpire in the future.

"And then there are the 83,858,848 warrants to purchase common at $59.62/share, which upon exercise would increase Berkshire's ownership significantly.

Mr. Buffett at the annual meeting in May of this year:

“We will not be making any offer for control of Occidental, but we love the shares we have,” Buffett said. “We may or may not own more in the future but we certainly have warrants on what we got on the original deal on a very substantial amount of stock around $59 a share, and warrants last a long time, and I’m glad we have them.”

https://buffett.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/08/afternoo...

Draw your own conclusion as to what will transpire in the future."

Is there a limit to how many shares can be owned without actually taking it over? (I thought there was a threshold above which companies had to initiate a full purchase but may be misremembering)

Barron’s,”” Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Buys More Occidental Stock
Berkshire Hathaway was a big buyer of Occidental Petroleum stock in recent days in what will be seen as a vote of confidence by CEO Warren Buffett in Occidental and its CEO Vicki Hollub after the company unveiled its $12 billion purchase of the privately held energy producer CrownRock on Monday.

Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased 10.5 million shares for about $590 million and now holds a stake of 238.5 million shares worth $13.6 billion in the energy company, or a 27% interest, according to a Form 4 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission late Wednesday.
The purchases were made from Monday through Wednesday with Berkshire paying an average price of about $56 a share. Buffett took advantage of the recent weakness in Occidental Petroleum’s stock price, which hit a 52-week low Tuesday. These are Berkshire’s first purchases since late October.
The deal hasn’t played well on Wall Street as Occidental stock has fallen about 5% since news of the talks broke last month. Some analysts called the price rich. The shares gained more than 1% early Thursday.
What’s Next: To finance the deal Occidental will add additional debt to what is the most leveraged balance sheet among its peers. This could make the company vulnerable if oil prices continue to drop but Occidental would benefit if energy prices rise.

—Andrew Bary“”

You asked for opinions. Here's my opinion:
Overview: I remember being in the weekly chemistry seminar (required attendance for chemistry majors) in 1973 and the topic was on atmospheric CO2 and global warming. Among the specifics discussed was ocean pH and how the oceans carbonate system absorbs CO2. I recently spoke to a professor who cited the oceans of the planet have averaged a 0.1 pH shift towards greater acidity in the past 50 years.

I grew up on a farm, worked for a large Fortune 500 industrial company and the past 40 years been an owner/operator of a manufacturing business in the environmental products space. While this does not qualify me for any kind of thought leadership, it has given perspectives of different sectors. Bottom line: our worldwide economic system depends an ever increasing amount of energy. Period. Similar to a quote Munger made around the time BRK bought into BYD, I feel there are technological answers arising that will ultimately address these issues. The issue is timing. Crushing down CO2 levels, say, in the next ten years is not likely to happen. Instead we will likely see CO2 levels rising for another decade or two because we do not have widespread alternatives available at costs affordable to all concerned. We will have these alternative energy outputs one day and they will replace much of the fossil fuel consumption. When that day arrives is open to speculation. My guess is this is a fifty year or longer change.

In the meantime, driving home last night and thinking about the recent negotiations at the COP (?) conference a concept popped into my mind at how intentional atmospheric particulate emission (think of a man-made equivalent to a volcano constantly emitting reflective particles into the atmosphere) would be a possibility somewhere in the Middle East's oil ownership zone. They have remote islands, have the energy, have the incentives and are not under the thumb of any particular global government. My feeling is this atmospheric work will not happen with any major nation simply because the internal agreement by all concerned inside a nation such as the USA is not possible. I do feel this emulation of what happens when some volcanos erupt can be utilized to counterbalance, in part, the effects of atmospheric CO2, CH4 and N2O. Here is a link to a Sierra Club commentary about this technology and the atmosphere: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/solar-geoenginee...

Assuming there are readers here who do not know the mechanics of how atmospheric gases affect atmospheric warming here is a good explanation with a listing of the gases most involved. https://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/module-2/how-greenhou...

I was re-reading the 1977 annual letter and came across this excerpt by Warren which made me think of our OXY position:

“Our experience has been that pro rata portions of truly outstanding businesses, sometimes sell in the securities markets at very large discounts from the prices they would command in negotiated transactions involving entire companies. Consequently, bargains in business ownership, which simply are not available directly through corporate acquisition, can be obtained indirectly through stock ownership. When prices are appropriate, we are willing to take large positions in selected companies, not with any intention of taking control and not foreseeing sell-out or merger, but with the expectation that excellent business results by corporations will translate over the long run into correspondingly excellent market value and dividend results for owners, minority as well as majority.”—WEB

It will be quite fun to see us continue to nibble and watch how it all plays out. I lean towards thinking we will ultimately make a full offer as we did BNSF but hard to say.

“Our experience has been that pro rata portions of truly outstanding businesses, sometimes sell in the securities markets at very large discounts from the prices they would command in negotiated transactions involving entire companies.

That's an interesting way of saying that you pay a premium to the market cap when acquiring the entire business.

uwharrie:
a concept popped into my mind at how intentional atmospheric particulate emission (think of a man-made equivalent to a volcano constantly emitting reflective particles into the atmosphere) would be a possibility

uw, there are MANY proposals for "geoengineering" that could counter global warming trends. In an appeal to authority, I will cite https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/reversing-... reviewing some of these. There advantage is they are insanely less expensive than "stopping using fossil fuels" and probably more reliable in their effect to boot.

You might be very interested in Neal Stephenson's 2021 novel called Termination Shock. The "man-made equivalent to a volcano" features heavily in this story.

There are many who don't seem to like the idea of geoengineering. Their best objection seems to be something like this:

We got in trouble because we made changes to the planet whose effect we did not understand or anticipate. Making additional changes to the planet to counter these first changes may also be subject to "unintended concsequences" that we do not currently understand or anticipate, so a program of just reversing the changes we already made seems more likely to succeed at solving the problem.

The answers to this objection seem to me to be

1) The geoengineering approaches are wildly less expensive ( 1/1000th the cost?) of reversing CO2 emissions, and they are things that can easily be turned on and then turned off or fine-tuned as their effects become better understood

2) It actually appears that the geo-engineering approaches are more likely to produce controllable cooling than reversing CO2 emissions

3) The idea that without global totalitarianism we might get developing countries to give up their development by cooperating in a CO2 emission reversal may be as unrealistic as the idea that communism will lead to an improvement in the lives of vast swathes of humanity. That is, a simple hypothesis that looks good if you don't think about it too hard, but is actually gigantically unlikely to work out the way it looks without your glasses on.

***

Anyway, the Stephenson book is amazingly cool and fun and even informative, if you like that kind of thing!

R:

1) The geoengineering approaches are wildly less expensive ( 1/1000th the cost?) of reversing CO2 emissions, and they are things that can easily be turned on and then turned off or fine-tuned as their effects become better understood

Ever since I read about the effects of iron-rich fertilizer on Pacific Ocean waters, I'm been hoping someone was going to charter a freighter, equip it with the distribution equipment and go start an algae bloom.

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