The conglomerate led by Warren Buffett for decades is Berkshire Hathaway.
Berkshire Hathaway is an American holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Its businesses include insurance, freight rail, utilities, energy, manufacturing, retail, and investments in publicly traded companies. Berkshire’s insurance operations, especially GEICO and General Re, provide capital that the company invests elsewhere.
The company is unusual among huge public corporations because it has two major publicly traded share classes: Class A shares and Class B shares. Class A shares have much greater voting and economic value per share, while Class B shares were created to make Berkshire ownership more accessible to smaller investors. The ticker symbols are BRK.A and BRK.B.
Warren Buffett became Berkshire’s chairman and chief executive after buying shares in the 1960s. Berkshire was originally a struggling textile manufacturer, but Buffett transformed it into a diversified holding company. Charlie Munger was a major partner in that transformation until his death in 2023.