Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

[PaulWaldman]

Uh oh! Check out the Legal Disclaimer. >Reproduction or distribution of any materials obtained on this website or linking to this website without written permission is prohibited.

Linking to this website without written permission is strictly prohibited. Really hope meesterdude obtained said required written permission prior posting.

[spoils19]

Is there any way to contact the webmaster for the site? It's important to let them know of any extraneous linking that may occur.

[indigodaddy]

Would seem hard to enforce or unenforceable. Was that ever even a thing where a website could disallow linking to it?

[XCSme]

What if the link is added in an NFT? How do they remove it?

[shreyshnaccount]

This type of website, with just the addition responsive text, is how most of the internet should ideally be.

[johnywalks]

I don't know. I really enjoy 10 popups when i visit a website.

[samwillis]

If the web had stoped innovating and improving at this level of design it wouldn't have the GDP it does now.

Your comment would almost fit better as a reply on the linked page from this other front page post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33680661

[nickelpro]

Please no, I like interesting and engaging design

[mhh__]

Still has some ads though

[dazc]

I think this has been posted multiple times but, yeah, they are never going to succeed with a website like this.

[divbzero]

Decent performance scores from PageSpeed Insights: 99 on mobile and 100 on desktop.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/report?url=https://berkshirehathaw...

I think this startup has a shot. Maybe even become a $100B+ company someday.

[JYellensFuckboy]

This plus never doing a stock split despite BRK.A trading at $468,000 per share are little details that show what an extraordinary and unique company it is. I don't think there's anyone in finance who cares about appearances less than Warren Buffet. The fact that he chooses to stay in Omaha, Nebraska instead of a penthouse in Manhattan's Financial District also seems to tie in to his modus operandi.

[api]

You don’t need a flashy site if you already have the reputation. But without other signals an old simple site will be interpreted by many as an indicator of something amateurish or outdated.

[zie]

> they are never going to succeed with a website like this.

How do you define success? BRK beat the S&P 500 returns for a few decades. They are one of the largest companies on planet earth(top 10), and their net income after all expenses is approaching $100B USD a year.

They own well known public companies like Dairy Queen, Duracell, BNSF Railroad, Geico Insurance, etc.

They seem pretty successful to me.

[mdp2021]

Those whose work pushes for a Liberace-and-spotlight outfit and those brought to a kuroi apparel.

[Scoundreller]

Did a View Source on their table of quarterly/annual reports, and there it is:

<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 15">

<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 15">

That equates to Office 2013

[johnorourke]

What a great example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

[8ytecoder]

It’s extremely hard to read on mobile though.

[dweekly]

See also: Craigslist

[miobrien]

I wish more websites/companies realized how effective, practical, and beautiful this design is.

[Waterluvian]

I want to make websites like this and run into the same problem every time: phones exist now.

The website is illegible on my phone. I have to do some zooming and panning and it feels awful.

It’s difficult to have a nice “classic web” page that runs on phones without a lot of care to use media queries. Not that that’s a deal breaker but it quickly departs from the “keep it simple” philosophy of these designs when you are effectively designing it twice.

[oldstrangers]

While I appreciate the sentiment, some of this hyperbole is a bit much. This _could_ be a beautiful design with some simple padding and margin updates, but as it is, horizontal text that literally stretches 24 inches across my 1440p monitor is not what I'd consider effective, practical, or beautiful.

[Bukhmanizer]

It’s weird that the “message from Warren Buffett” is an ad for Geico and a jewelry brand. I get that they’re subsidiaries but still.

[mdasen]

It's very on-brand for Buffett if you follow his stuff. He's always kinda hawking the stuff he owns. You'll see the can of Coke on the table at the annual meeting, you'll see him eating See's Candies, he'll talk about the brands he owns, etc.

It's not pushy or overly sales-like, but he is into a lot of the stuff he owns. The message about GEICO is really frank: different insurance carriers vary in their underwriting judgments, but he estimates that GEICO will offer the lowest rate for 40% of people which is more often than any carrier. Go to the website and see if you can save money.

For some of the businesses, it can be a bit personal. He bought Nebraska Furniture Mart over a handshake from someone he'd known for a long time.

It is a little weird, but it's certainly on-brand for him.

[paulluuk]

I assumed this was a fake website that was trying to get people to buy dodgy insurance "because Warren Buffet recommends it".

[kayamon]

He really is the world's best door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.

His advice on how to make money is basically that you should give some to him. Sometimes you just have to stand back and clap.

[lupire]

Why? He owns those companies.

[amin]

“The more beautiful the brochure, the more skeptical you should be.”

- popular saying amongst Dutch investors

[Scoundreller]

Obviously the trick is to own the companies that sell with the beautiful brochures, as is the case here.

40% of BH's publicly-traded holdings are AAPL stock. 11% is Bank of America. 9% is Chevron. 7% is Coca Cola.

https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/

You could replicate 84% of the publicly-traded side of BH with 8 US-based holdings.

But BH trades at 1.5x price to book... not sure if it's really worth it. But there's some VC-style genius in his non-trading holdings (e.g. GEICO and railways) directly held on its book or its <1% public holdings.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BRK-A/key-statistics/

(Though the asset value of the railroads, railcars, energy, pipelines, etc. (not even including liabilities) is about equal to its AAPL holdings, which is all asset/equity).

Overall, if you want a set-and-forget investment, I'd still say go for BH stock.

[samwillis]

I wander if you look at "website bytes" to market cap as a metric, these might be most valuable bytes?

(That's if you ignore the websites of subsidies)

[gabcoh]

If they took down their website tomorrow would their market cap change at all? Are these then perhaps some of the least “valuable bytes” which explains the website’s design?

[bob1029]

I am seeing something like $100 million per byte in my browser (excluding analytics and geico ads).

[osigurdson]

I get it, but I don't think many companies could get away with this. The site is for serious investors and simplicity is part of the brand. Imagine miro.com (whatever that is but I've seen lots of ads for in on YouTube), using this type of style - it seems unlikely that it would be successful. I'd like to see someone try however.

[heratyian]

I visited their corporate HQ in Omaha last summer. No signs on the building. No indication it's one of the most valuable companies in the world.

[PaulWaldman]

I love that it looks like it hasn't been updated in 30 years, yet the copyright date indicates 2022.

[karaterobot]

The most recent news post is about https://berkshirehathawaytx.com/, a crypto exchange that is obviously trying to use the brand. The TX evidently stands for Texas, don't you know.

[acqbu]

Is the website coded and maintained by Buffet himself?

[JYellensFuckboy]

Normally I loathe Geico ads with every fiber of my being, but that little guy at the bottom of the page is so cute!

[indus]

but their annual meeting is five hours :-)

[bernardv]

They have no need for glitzy smoke and mirrors. Love it.

[yieldcrv]

Why is "WEB" capitalized there

something something the 90s?

[BRKB]

Warren E. Buffett (WEB) ... It's a joke.

[prpl]

Nice pun in there about the WEB page.

[yuvalkarmi]

Why is there a Geico ad on the site?

[miobrien]

GEICO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway that provides coverage for more than 24 million motor vehicles owned by more than 15 million policy holders as of 2017.

[twiceaday]

Berkshire owns Geico.

[Waterluvian]

In my opinion a ton of class and prestige is lost by putting an ad on a front page. So it must yield their subsidiary huge returns to be “worth” it.

Disclaimer: am not a billionaire.

[foobarian]

Probably pays more than enough to run that site

[throwthere]

SEO. Really.

[BRKB]

On the other hand, Berkshire Hathaway is Apple's largest investor.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy owns and operates some of the world's largest wind and solar energy farms and is building state-of-the-art Terrapower (Bill Gates) nuclear reactors:

https://www.brkenergy.com/

There's a lot for a "tech investor" to like about the company. As a consequence, Berkshire has a top-notch subreddit, probably the best subreddit of any company:

r/brkb (https://old.reddit.com/r/brkb/)

Other investors will appreciate that Berkshire owns all of a large part of America's freight transportation system:

https://www.bnsf.com/

And is the largest investor in important parts of its financial system (Bank of America), etc.