By Justin Baer

Berkshire Hathaway used to be a middling textile company. Now, as Warren Buffett prepares to pass on the helm after six decades, it is everything but.

Over the decades, the company has accumulated dozens of businesses that employ more than 392,000 people. Its vast portfolio of stock investments give it exposure to more. Some of the companies it owns are household names: Dairy Queen, Fruit of the Loom, See's candy, Duracell batteries, the paint company Benjamin Moore.

Other subsidiaries operate under names that aren't so recognizable, but their products are. Berkshire companies sell artificial turf for football fields, recreational vehicles and hotel shuttle buses, and diamond rings. There are cowboy boots and Garanimals-label baby clothing. One company rents out cubicles to offices; another designs and manufacturers flight simulators for pilots.

Four giants

In recent years, though, Berkshire came to rely more heavily on what Buffett himself has called his "four giants": an insurance empire; one of North America's largest railroads; an energy behemoth; and a sizable stake in the world's most valuable company, Apple.

These four holdings dominate Berkshire's earnings and value and, in each their own way, come to symbolize Buffett's investment philosophies and interests.

Insurance

Berkshire owns one of the largest U.S. auto insurers, Geico, along with many primary and reinsurance carriers.

"The product will never be obsolete," Buffett wrote in his 2021 letter to shareholders.

While Geico might be well-known -- that gecko is everywhere, after all -- other Berkshire insurers take on more unusual risks. For example, Berkshire insured PepsiCo against the unlikely event that a monkey would pick a series of numbers correctly on national television. (It didn't.)

Insurers are core to Berkshire because they reliably churn out each year tens of billions of dollars in "float," or cash Buffett in turn put to work in countless other investments.

Railroads

Berkshire's railroad, BNSF, is one of the largest in the U.S. It operates on a track network of more than 32,500 route miles in 28 states and three Canadian provinces.

When Berkshire announced in 2009 it would buy out the remaining shares of BNSF it didn't already own, Buffett called the investment an "all-in wager on the economic future of the United States."

Energy

Berkshire entered the business of generating and distributing energy through its 1999 investment in MidAmerican Energy, a Des Moines, Iowa, utility. Now called Berkshire Hathaway Energy, the business has grown steadily through a series of deals. Earnings from the business have increased more than 30-fold over the past two decades.

Its most-important acquisition, though, may have been Greg Abel, the former accountant and MidAmerican executive who has emerged as Buffett's pick to succeed him as Berkshire chief executive. "Greg will be more successful than I have been, and if I said otherwise, my nose would grow, " Buffett told The Wall Street Journal in late 2023.

Apple

No Berkshire investment is more representative of Buffett's ability to adapt to the modern stock market than his interest in Apple, the consumer-electronics giant. Berkshire owned 300 million of the company's shares outstanding at the end of 2024, a stake then worth about $75 billion.

Berkshire had pared its stake in Apple significantly -- the company owned more than 900 million shares at the end of 2023 -- though it stopped selling in late 2024. It still owned about 2% of the iPhone maker in December.

Write to Justin Baer at justin.baer@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 06, 2025 09:59 ET (13:59 GMT)

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