Our Warren Buffett Expert Shares the Rewards and Challenges of Covering The Oracle By Andrew Bary Feb. 14, 2020 7:56 pm Photograph by Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images Text size Covering Berkshire Hathaway has been one of the most rewarding and challenging parts of my job. The company has a mythical status, and CEO Warren Buffett is revered by investors for his extraordinary record during 55 years at Berkshire’s helm—and as the conscience of American capitalism. Understanding Berkshire isn’t easy. The company is huge and complex, and Buffett offers little access to reporters. Wall Street analysts are treated the same way, and the result is scant coverage. Berkshire, the No. 6 U.S. company in market value, is covered by a handful of analysts, while Facebook, No. 5, is covered by more than 50. That means digging through Berkshire’s filings, talking to knowledgeable investors, and digesting whatever Buffett writes in his annual letters or says at the annual meeting or in sporadic TV appearances. We like to think that Barron’s provides the best coverage of Berkshire anywhere. I’ve written a dozen major stories on Berkshire over more than 20 years. The first was a cover story, published in late 1999 when, like now, Berkshire was out of favor with investors. The knock then was that Buffett had missed the tech-stock boom, leaving Berkshire’s Class A shares languishing around $54,000. Our story was generally upbeat, but longtime readers still needle me about it because the headline was “What’s Wrong, Warren?” and the first paragraph asked whether he had “lost his magic touch.” READ BARY’S LATEST COVER STORY Inside Berkshire Hathaway’s Buffett-Less Future He hadn’t, of course. Buffett refused to be drawn into the tech bubble and over the next 20 years built the world’s biggest conglomerate with what he calls a Fort Knox balance sheet. The stock is up sixfold since then, handily topping the S&P 500 index. I got one opportunity to interview Buffett, back in 2003. He was generous with his time, took me to a lunch club at the top of the Omaha tower where Berkshire is headquartered, and ordered a BLT sandwich. Buffett has always been selective about investments, and even then, with the S&P 500 around 1,000, he said, “We’re not finding anything. We have more cash than ideas.” I’ve regularly made a pitch for a second interview. But he has politely turned me down, prompting me to tell him I feel like the guy in the 1930s hit song “I Can’t Get Started With You.” (Buffett told me he favors the 1937 version by Bunny Berigan.) We’ve generally been bullish on Berkshire over the past 20 years, but we’ve never veered into adulation. We correctly top-ticked the stock in late 2007 with an article, “Sorry, Warren, Your Stock’s Too Pricey,” before it was cut in half during the financial crisis. And two years ago, we wrote a cover story, “Beyond Buffett,” in which we offered some suggestions. We argued that Berkshire needed to repurchase more stock (which it subsequently did), pay a dividend (which it hasn’t), and showcase potential successors so Wall Street could evaluate them (which it has done only vaguely). That didn’t sit well with some readers, who argued that we had no business questioning Buffett. While we have enormous admiration for Buffett, we won’t shrink from criticizing him if we feel it’s warranted. With the Oracle turning 90 this year, the next few years promise to be fascinating, and could well include the long-awaited CEO succession. Will the company that Buffett painstakingly built hang together or be broken up like nearly every other major conglomerate? It could be a tumultuous decade for Berkshire after more than a half-century of remarkable stability. Write to Andrew Bary at andrew.bary@barrons.com