Berkshire Hathaway is currently worth 668 billion dollars.
360,000 employees globally.
245 billion in revenue
42 billion in 2020 profit, down from 81 billion in 2019.
For this particular case.
The topic relates to a company Berkshire owns called Special Metals in West Virginia, where 450 employees went on strike and want a 2% wage increase, with benefits boosted.
Bernie Sanders called on Buffett to increase the salary, but I don’t think understands the business model of Berkshire.
First up, to get an idea of Berkshire, here’s there portfolio for companies they don’t own, but own part of.
22% Apple
13% Bank of America
11% Wells Fargo
10% Coca Cola
8% American Express
8% Kraft Heinz
3% US Bancorp
3% JP Morgan
2% BNY
2% Goldman Sachs
Berkshire’s portfolio is worth 343 billion dollars as of December 17th and those are the notable pieces of the stock portfolio.
In those companies, Buffett has almost zero oversight and many of them just give him the information that goes out the same moment to all stock holders.
Buffett is also not on the board of any companies outside of Berkshire and has no say in management for any of them.
Next up are companies Buffett/Berkshire actually own.
Geico
Duracell
Dairy Queen
BNSF Railway
Fruit of the Loom
Helzberg Diamonds
See’s Candy
Pampered Chef
NetJets
61 companies directly owned by Berkshire, but an amusing thing is none of them are managed.
The biggest example of how Buffett/Berkshire work is the Washington Post.
Warren Buffett until the Bezos buyout owned a 28% stake in the Washington Post and it started with a 12% stake in the 70s.
He called up the president and said “I’m Warren Buffett and I come in peace”.
For Buffett and Berkshire, Bernie is asking something which violates the companies bylaws and code.
They write checks to places making money.
They tell them to do what they want.
They collect
Bernie Sanders can go ask for a raise to the CEO of Special Metals, but asking Buffett is just an attempt to make the web unhappy, not realizing Buffett has no legal control in this case.