About Warren

After 60+ years at the helm, Warren Buffett says he plans to step down.

I had a great weekend, hope you did as well. There is one thing most of us probably missed, however: perhaps the last chance to fly down to Nebraska to attend a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in person, at least while Warren Buffett is still leading the company.

I've been following these meetings for at least 10 or 15 years? Probably more -- however long it's been that you could casually stream the whole thing on YouTube. In fact, I had thought about heading down to Omaha -- not that I had any inside information, but I had a gut feeling that given Buffett's age (94), and the fact that he's already named a successor, Greg Abel, he might take the chance to step back.

Sure enough, with five minutes to go after a no-joke five-hour on-stage performance, Buffett laid out his plan to do exactly that: Without even telling Abel ahead of time, Buffett announced he would ask Berkshire's board to hand over power to Abel by the end of this year.

I wrote for Inc. about how much I liked the way Buffett rolled this out. (You can find that article here if you like). And, I suspect I'll have something more to say about Buffett's unmatched 60-year-plus tenure as the head of what is now a $1 trillion company.

As the weekend winds down, however, I thought I'd pull together and revise some of the history of the company that I've compiled over the years -- things about why it was a fascinating American success story long before Buffett became a household name.

Let me know how much of this you already knew:

1. Berkshire was born almost 100 years before Buffett was.

The company traces its roots to the late stages of the Industrial Revolution in New England, and a textile business called the Valley Falls Company. It was originally founded in 1839 in Cumberland, Rhode Island (my hometown; the image above is the original company!), by a former carpenter turned industrialist named Oliver Chace, and his sons Harvey and Samuel B. Chace.

The two brothers were ardent abolitionists; Samuel’s wife, Elizabeth, even ran a stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves.

2. It owes its origins to a case of industrial espionage from the 1700s.

Chace had learned about the textile industry by working under an early immigrant American entrepreneur from England, named Samuel Slater. Slater, in turn, established his first mill in the United States after memorizing plans for mills and machinery in England–and thus smuggling them into the United States.

He was known as an American hero — but in Great Britain? “Slater the Traitor.”

3. Ironically, given what happened later, it originally grew as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

Chace died in 1852; his sons and others continued running Valley Falls Company and other interests for decades. Then, in 1929, the company merged with a Massachusetts textile company and took a new name: Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates. The name changed again after another merger in 1955, this time with Hathaway Manufacturing Company.

4. It was successful in its original industry for quite some time.

At its height in 1948, while still being led by Chace’s descendants, Berkshire employed 11,000 people and earned $29.5 million (about $384 million today). After the merger with Hathaway, the combined company reached a peak of $120 million in revenue (about $1.4 billion today).

5. Buffett’s interest was a key example of his theory of “value investing.”

Berkshire Hathaway began to decline in the 1950s; Buffett started buying shares in 1962. His rationale was that the company was shrinking because the industry was imperiled, but the share price was falling faster than the sum of its parts.

Buffett also later explained that every time Berkshire Hathaway closed or divested itself of a mill, it would offer to buy its stock back from investors.

6. But he later called Berkshire the dumbest stock he ever bought.

The reason? It was the flip side of what attracted him: the textile industry was dying.

He later said he should have just taken the money and invested it in the stock market, but he didn’t follow one of his own most-quoted pieces of advice: “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars. I look for 1-foot bars I can step over.”

7. Buffett bought the entire company because he was angry with the CEO.

Buffett had a strong disagreement with the CEO of Berkshire at the time, Seabury Stanton, over the price that Berkshire would pay to buy back its stock (after closing another mill). In short, Buffett thought he had a deal, but when the paperwork came in Stanton had changed the price.

“This made me mad,” Buffett said. “So I went out and started buying the stock, and I bought control of the company, and fired Mr. Stanton.”

8. Still, it was a great learning experience.

In 1985, Berkshire got out of textiles entirely; it now functions as a holding company with interests in insurance and finance, retail, media, tech, and many other fields.

“It took me 20 years to give up on the textile business,” Buffett said. “We just kept working at it, trying…. Another mistake. If you’re gonna be brilliant with a lousy business, why not be brilliant with a good business?”

9. The company now has the most expensive stock in America.

A single Class A share of Berkshire Hathaway goes for more than $810,000, making it by far the most expensive publicly traded stock. (It’s also roughly 10X what it was when I first started watching.)

Buffett always refused to split Berkshire Hathaway stock, so as to discourage short-term trading and volatility.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• An air traffic controller reportedly warned that Newark Liberty International Airport is unsafe for travelers due to staff shortages. Flights to and from the busy airport just outside New York City have been plagued by delays, which the Federal Aviation Administration said are being caused by a shortage of air traffic controllers. (Yahoo News)

• Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was returned to power in an election Saturday, the latest left-leaning leader to achieve a comeback victory as President Trump roils global markets and upends international affairs. (WSJ)

• Brazilian police say they prevented a planned bomb attack targeting the free Lady Gaga concert in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday night. The free concert took place on Saturday night on Copacabana Beach. More than 2 million people attended, making it the largest show of Lady Gaga's career. The anticipation leading up to the gig was immense, with fans coming to the beach days earlier. (NPR)

• Texas has a brand-new city, and its name is Starbase. A vote Saturday to decide whether to turn part of south Texas into a new city centered around Elon Musk’s SpaceX delivered a victory to the tech billionaire and his rocket company. The final vote tally Saturday night was 212 in favor of incorporation and six against. (NBC News)

• A Wisconsin woman who went missing more than 60 years ago was recently found "alive and well." Audrey Backeberg was 20 when she disappeared from her home in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, in July 1962. A cold case detective recently used Backeberg's Ancestry.com account to track her down: "Ultimately, we came up with an address ... So I called the local sheriff's department, said 'Hey, there's this lady living at this address. Do you guys have somebody, you can just go pop in?' ... Ten minutes later, she called me, and we talked for 45 minutes." An abusive husband apparently may have played a role in Backeberg's initial decision to leave without a trace. (CBS News)

• Latest ridiculous TikTok trend: Men shaving off their eyelashes to try to look more masculine. (CNN)

• Archaeologists in Eastern Bohemia have announced the chance discovery of a rare treasure: Hikers discovered a roughly 15-pound stash of gold coins and other valuables worth about $680,000. Now authorities are embarked on a mystery to figure out who might have hidden the valuables and why; one theory of course is that they might have been buried by victims of the Nazis, but it's not yet clear. (Radio Prague)

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Thanks for reading. Photo is public domain. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.