But where's the opportunity, and I'll touch on the challenge—where's the opportunity in these businesses and how is Clayton tackling it? It's very much around pursuing the American dream and can we help deliver that. And what I have is—I'm going to have our team bring up a slide that highlights this: this is actually what we call a CrossMod home. We have it in the exhibit hall; it got moved in, had to cut the back off a little bit, so it's not quite the full size if you're comparing it to this. But the reality is this is where the opportunity is within Clayton: we want to deliver an affordable home to the American consumer.
This home you're looking at—thank you, and thank you to our Clayton team—including the lot price, assuming it's in the $40,000 range (and there's a lot of places in America where it's well below that; we recognize some others it may be greater), but we can deliver this home onsite-built, two-bedroom family home, very, very beautiful living space for $249,000 delivered, including the lot. That's absolutely incredible—that's delivering affordability to the consumer.
Now, the CrossMod, how can we get it to that price? 70% of that home is built in our manufacturing side of our facilities. Those manufacturing homes we produce, we now use it. The last 30% is built by our site builders. They bring the street appeal and all the features that a homeowner may want. So it's an exceptional product. Now we don't stop there. We still have a very strong culture around manufactured homes, and what's the extreme on that? Well, if we deliver a single—and this is a thousand square feet—if we take it to the manufacturing home and think of a traditional manufactured home (and our team probably won't like it), it's more the square box, but what it does create is a home. It can be a two-bedroom with very nice living space, very well done, and now has a 30-year plus life on these assets just like this one. They can get a 30-year mortgage on the CrossMod or on a manufactured home now. So that's the quality we're building it to. And we can now do a single manufactured home for just under $35,000. We can deliver it; they still have to get their lot or rent one, but the reality is we're creating homes that people can afford, and that's really where the opportunity is within Clayton. So very proud of what our team's doing there.
Now lastly, I'm going to move to the service and retailing business. I'm not going to dive into it in our consumer products business—again, we'll have Adam here—but when I think of those businesses (and Adam's been in that role since December), he's very much learning the businesses and getting to know the management team. Like myself, he will be very focused on capital allocation and risk, but also very focused on helping the team achieve operational excellence across those businesses. Now, if you think of those 32 businesses, we have a wide spectrum of where they are in their life cycle. We have some that are still growing and growing very quickly, some growing at a much smaller pace, and then some I would call in the more mature cycle but still creating a valued product to the customer and creating capital and producing cash flows that often within those businesses we'll redeploy across our other businesses. We'll have that chance to discuss that with Adam.
The last thing I just want to touch on before we move to the second session and I wrap up here: I'm going to move to our balance sheet and activity associated with that. In our first quarter of 2026, we purchased $235 million of Berkshire stock. We've talked about this often, but when do we purchase stock? It's when our intrinsic value—conservatively determined—exceeds the current price of our shares. And we do that literally. Warren and I will be discussing this on a daily basis... we think about it daily. And the reality is there's a lot of different ways to calculate intrinsic value. It can be a simple premium over book value; you can take book value because we have everything at a historical cost basis and try to adjust our various companies—BNSF is recorded on the books at the original price we bought it at versus what it's valued at today. Or if I think of it more as how we would think of businesses when we buy a stock or a full company: we have our balance sheet, we know what our cash is, we know what our US treasuries are, we know what our equity investments are (they're marked to market), and then we have our operating companies. And that's where we have to think about what are the long-term economic prospects of those businesses 5 years, 10 years from now. And then the other important part of that equation is how do we redeploy that capital that comes off of it. And that's really the approach we take to the intrinsic values.
Now let's move to our balance sheet—the very specific numbers. There's a lot of numbers here; again, I'll touch on a few captions. If you look at our cash and US Treasury bills, there's a risk that people use the $397.4 billion as the headline number because that is our cash and US treasuries sitting there at the end of March. However—and we don't like these type of adjustments, but it is important to communicate it—there is $17.2 billion of payables associated with the treasuries that are in that total. How does that happen? We bought the treasuries right before the end of March, and the payable—i.e., the fact we use our cash to purchase those treasuries—occurred right after the end of March. So we've got the treasuries up in the 397 and we're still holding the cash. Accordingly, our cash in US Treasury bills net is $380 billion. And yes, it grew by that $7 billion you can see on the slide. The other important thing to focus on is our cash and investments at the bottom: the $705.8 billion versus the $708.7 billion at the end of the year, so we're down just under $3 billion.
Now what drives that or what's the underlying numbers behind that? We produced close to $10.5 billion of income and related cash flows in the first quarter. We also would have incurred certain capital expenditures against our businesses to either reduce risk, manage them on a sustainable basis, or to pursue growth—that was just under $5 billion. Again, we are involved in our management teams as they decide to deploy that capital and very comfortable with that. And then the other piece of the equation in the first quarter was we closed on the OxyChem transaction; $9.5 billion flowed out associated with that. We did have two transactions last year that we announced: OxyChem (which closed this year) and Bell Labs—a smaller transaction, but we're fortunate to have them join our company. Warren likes to say we finally delivered on Charlie's objective around a "rat poison" company that we value highly. But the reality is that's not in that number; the OxyChem transaction resulted in a little more than a $3 billion decrease in our results. So with that, a very wholesome business update. I appreciate the opportunity to share where our businesses are and where they're going. Thank you.
Now, I'm very excited to shortly have Ajit join us on stage and we'll move to the Q&A. But as we transition to that session, we'll have the GEICO video narrated by Nancy Nicely. Thank you.
[GEICO Video Segment Begins]
Nancy Nicely: GEICO started out 90 years ago by trying to make things simple and giving a great price and service to customers. And when you think about it, today is exactly the same thing; we're just continuing to try and perfect that and make it a little better every day, a little faster, a little easier. I'm Nancy Nicely and I became CEO of GEICO in December of 2025. Prior to that, I was the Chief Operating Officer, but I've just had my 40th anniversary with GEICO. I started as a claims associate in 1986 right out of college and I've just had the pleasure over many years of working in just about every department or every sector that GEICO has. So while I started in claims, I've been in pricing, I've been in product management, I've been in underwriting, and I've had an opportunity to run operations in different parts of the country. But what really has kept me all these years and what inspires all 30,000 people at GEICO is every day we're delivering for customers. We're saving them money on a product that everyone has to have but maybe you don't necessarily want to use. But when you do need to use it, that's really the "moment of truth". For us to be able to do that and to do it in a way that saves people money and gives that outstanding customer service—that's what excites me every day. And the reason that we have customers and will continue to grow is just keeping that as our North Star.
GEICO was founded in 1936 by Leo and Lillian Goodwin. Their idea was to come direct to consumers and to cut out the middleman and to have much better cost and service for those customers. So in 1951, Benjamin Graham took an investment in GEICO, and of course, one of his students was Warren Buffett. That's when Warren really started to think about GEICO and deeply try and figure out what we were doing. That was one of his first very big personal investments, and then later he started investing Berkshire Hathaway shares, and by 1996 he owned all of GEICO. From that beginning, we now insure millions of cars, trucks, RVs, campers, etc. We're in all 50 states. We try and be there wherever the customer needs us. I think from the first time I met Warren or Greg or Ajit, they always start by talking about integrity and reputation and making sure you're doing the right thing for customers. So, it's something we live and breathe every day at GEICO and it's absolutely a big part of our culture.
Obviously, Berkshire Hathaway was founded in some ways on insurance, and being wholly owned has just been terrific for GEICO and terrific for our customers over the years because it really allows us to invest in our business and to make long-term decisions, not quarterly or annual decisions on what's best for growing our business. And you know, obviously Berkshire has many other insurance companies besides GEICO and we do work together with them. GEICO sells many of their products today and we continue to look and bring more of them onto the GEICO platform. There are always cycles in insurance; sometimes there's bad weather. It is just making sure the company's prepared for all of those things and to deliver on that promise that we make to customers—to be there in their hour of need. We take that very seriously. If you're involved in an auto accident, the last thing you want is to go weeks and weeks before you get paid. So, we really strive to do that now in minutes where possible, as opposed to in days or hours. Nobody really wants to spend a lot of time with their insurance company, but when they do, we want to make sure they're getting the very best service as fast as they possibly can. When I think about innovation, it's really about things that are going to allow us to handle claims faster than anybody else in the industry. What I'm really focused on is our customer loyalty and retention. I think that what I'd like to communicate is just that every day, 30,000 people at GEICO go to work in support of millions and millions of customers. And I want you to know that that's what the GEICO team is delivering for Berkshire day in and day out—a reputation of doing the right thing, saving customers money, and just giving outstanding service.
[Video Ends]
Greg Abel: Thank you, Nancy, and to the GEICO team, thank you. We've got an exceptional leader in Nancy Nicely. Welcome, Ajit; great to be up here together. Ajit, if you don't mind, I'll start with what I touched on: Tokyo Marine—an exceptional transaction and relationship I know you've built over many years with the Tokyo Marine management team. If you could just expand on that strategic transaction and relationship, we'd love to start with that.
Ajit Jain: Sure, thank you. Tokyo Marine & Fire is the largest non-life insurance company in Japan. They've been doing business for more than 100-odd years and are clearly regarded as a blue-chip company in the international arena. They're clearly number one in Japan; every insurance company would like to be associated with them. We, being in the insurance business for the last God knows how many years, we've tried year after year to get a relationship going with Tokyo Marine & Fire. It has not been easy because one of the things we bring to the business is a capital partner, and Tokyo Marine were cash-rich and really never needed capital in a big way. They have been expanding in Japan, now given the limited growth there, they've looked overseas. Over these last 8-10 years, they've really got most of the low-hanging fruit overseas that they would like to get. Nevertheless, they are keen and hungry for business elsewhere outside Japan. And last year we got a chance to spend some time with them and talk in very general terms about what the two of us could be doing and should be doing with each other. After that initial conversation, things moved fairly quickly.
So to sort of get to the bottom line—in March we finally announced a transaction with them. That transaction has three legs to it: firstly, we bought some stock in the company; we wrote a check for $1.8 billion US and we got 2.5% of the stock of Tokyo Marine & Fire. Secondly, they have a good and profitable book of business in terms of what they write in Japan and elsewhere. We took a piece of the property-casualty business that they write, and you know, we compensated them for their efforts in originating and running the business, but we get a slice of their business for several years down the road. And the third piece was a sort of strategic agreement between the two of us. It is not spelled out in a lot of detail, and normally I would be very concerned about having open-ended strategic transactions, but Tokyo Marine—they are a quality company. In fact, they remind me of the phrase that JP Morgan used—doing first-class business in a first-class way; that is Tokyo Marine in the insurance industry. We have a general statement that we'll work with each other, we'll coordinate when it comes to finding opportunities elsewhere and running businesses operationally, and that is something that will evolve over time. And I certainly hope this serves as a springboard for both of us to move on to the next plateau
Greg Abel: Thank you, Ajit. It’s an exceptional transaction and a real long-term relationship. Thank you so much. And you know, it reminds me of our five other Japanese companies that we’ve made investments in. Yes, we like the financial investment, but we also see long-term strategic relationships that can develop across one or all five of them. So I fully support and am excited by everything you just described. Thank you. Now we’ll move to the more traditional Q&A—question and answer—and we’ll go again to the stations and to Becky. But today we’ll start with station one.
Question (Deepfake Warren Buffett at Station 1): Hi, my name is Warren—Warren from Omaha. I’ve recently undergone a—let’s call it—a significant change in role, and I have, well, let’s just say a not insignificant portion of my net worth tied up in Berkshire stock. Now Greg, I’ve been watching this company for a long time—a very long time—and I’ve been telling people that I have no intentions of selling a single share—not one. So, my question is a simple one: I’m 95 years old, I’ve got nothing but time and Cherry Coke, and I want to know, just so I have something to tell my fellow shareholders, why should they hold their Berkshire shares for the long term? Anyway, Greg, take it from here.
Greg Abel: Well, "Warren from Omaha," very astute question. If I think of what we’ve already discussed this morning, which is our culture and values, and highlighted that’s the bedrock of Berkshire, then what did it create? It created the foundation that we have today, and that’s this incredible set of assets that exists within Berkshire. We have our insurance business, led by Ajit and his team, and we’ve talked about it being the heart, with talent and opportunities because we have capital available—and it’ll be available at different times—but we’ve got significant opportunities there.
If I think of our non-insurance businesses, I spent a lot of time on those, but we’ve got unique opportunities on the operational excellence side and we’ll pursue them, and there will be incremental investment opportunities in there. We have our equity investments, as we know, and we also have a very important asset: we have our cash in US treasuries. It serves a couple of purposes: one—and you’ve heard Warren and Charlie say this before, and I’ve said it—we do not intend to be beholden to anyone. We start with that position. Thank you. And it’s how we manage Berkshire, and we’ll continue to manage Berkshire. Now, that asset—the cash and treasuries—also creates a unique opportunity. It creates the opportunity to deploy it across these different groups. It will be dependent upon the opportunity—i.e., is there a strong value proposition—but if it presents itself, we’ll be prepared to act decisively and with significant capital. That’s what it’s there for.
And we do have opportunities within the equity investments that we currently have, and beyond that, we have our operating businesses, as I said. There, it can be deploying capital back into those businesses, as I touched on the capital expenditure side, or it can be the incremental opportunity to acquire 100% of a business. And then there’s the opportunities that Ajit’s already alluded to on the insurance side.
But what’s the other unique thing is—yes, Berkshire is a conglomerate, and we recognize that—but we are a unique conglomerate in that we can move our capital very efficiently. That’s the value of the conglomerate: we can move our capital very efficiently across each of those groups. We can move it from insurance to non-insurance, into equities, or, if we so choose, to hold it in cash, or back across those in a very efficient way, in a very tax-efficient way. I would also add to the fact—how are we unique as a conglomerate? We live by the fact that we hate bureaucracy. We do not embrace it in our—thank you. Yes, Ajit’s the biggest fan; he reminds me constantly, and I love it, I treasure it. But no, we’ve heard many times the ABCs: the arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency that can creep into a company will kill a company. And we intend to never allow that to happen.
So we have this unique opportunity to both take the businesses we have today, take that foundation, and build upon it. We also have that capital to be deployed back into them. How will I personally, and the team, define success? We’ll define success as: can we ensure that Berkshire endures in its current form? That means we do business as we do today, consistent with the cultures, values, and business principles we have, with both the long-term objective and with great purpose and intent to create long-term value for our shareholders. That will define success.
Deepfake Warren Buffett: Anyway, Greg, I’ll let you take it from here. I’ve got a few things on my plate. Actually, excuse me, I need to take this; someone may want to sell me their business. I hope it’s an elephant.
Greg Abel: Now, as you’ve all picked up, that was a—that was a deepfake. But here’s the interesting thing: that was done with zero input from Warren—voice, photo. We were able to obtain that with information that’s out there and replicate those actions and that voice. And the reality is that’s what we’re dealing with when we think of Berkshire and how we have to protect it every day. It can go to deepfakes, and they’re using a way to try to penetrate our business; it can be cyberattacks. But it’s a great reminder for our team because that is a significant risk across Berkshire that we’re managing every day—cyber risk—and it’s one that we take extremely seriously. I touched on the technology side: we’re constantly using technology to protect our businesses, and then we’re also trying to use technology to identify it. We’ve all heard about the myths and what’s going on there. We’re very focused on those risks. But Ajit, before we move truly to our first question—and you’ve touched on this many times—when we think of cyber risk and we insure it, what’s our current approach across our insurance businesses and your thoughts there?
Ajit Jain: Okay. So cyber is something we worry about in the insurance operation at two levels. Firstly, there is a huge demand by people in business all over the world who are interested in buying protection against some kind of a cyber incident. We have been slow—consciously, we have been slow—in terms of entering that class of business as an underwriter. The reason for that is, firstly, on cyber I find it very difficult to have some meaningful method to assess and model the aggregation. People will tell you we’ve got it under control and they’ll show you all kinds of models, but nothing that I can really hang my hat on in terms of... we really have a good feeling for what the aggregate exposure is. Because any risk we take on, the first question we ask ourselves is "how bad can bad be," and I’m not sure we can answer that question as well as we should.
So the second reason is, cyber has been a very popular, fashionable product in these last several years. We have not played in it. Now, as it turns out, there haven't been very many cyber losses, so people who’ve taken on cyber risk have actually made profits, and as a result of which the premiums that cyber insurance commands have been coming down over time. So, we’d hate entering a line of business where prices are coming down. So we're sort of sitting on the sidelines, and I’m not sure when, but I’m pretty certain that the day will come when we will have a fairly significant role to play in cyber. Secondly, you know, we—being a large company—are exposed to cyber perils ourselves. We try and do the best we can; I think we are as good as anyone else. Now, cyber insurance is very highly regulated by the regulators, and we’ve been consistently above what the regulations call for. So, I think we’re doing the best we can, but I cannot be categorical about it.
Greg Abel: Thank you, Ajit. Let’s go now truly to the Q&A session. Becky, we’ll start with you, and thank you for being so patient.
Becky Quick: Thank you. Thanks, Greg. This first question, Ajit—let’s follow up with the AI. This is slightly different, though. This comes from Billy D. Ross in Ardsley, New York, who writes: "In an era of increasingly complex risk models and AI tools, where does human judgment still provide Berkshire a competitive advantage?"
Ajit Jain: Okay, could you just repeat the last part of the question?
Becky Quick: Yeah, where is human judgment still a competitive advantage for Berkshire when you consider AI tools that are out there?
Ajit Jain: Yeah, so AI also is very fashionable right now. People are jumping into it from the insurance space and from the non-insurance space, and clearly, if AI becomes reality as it’s being projected, then there’s no question about it—it’ll be a huge game-changer. Right now, what we are seeing is AI being used as a productivity tool, as a mechanism for reducing labor costs and doing routine, repetitive things. I do not think AI will reach a point where you can make a tradeoff on things like pricing or settling a claim; that is still years away. And you know, I tend to be skeptical; I’ll be surprised if AI can solve that problem for you. So if you’re counting on AI telling you which stock to buy and which one to sell, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Greg Abel: Ajit, I found it interesting—Ajit and I were together a few weeks ago and Ajit got his team on the phone because we were discussing this exact question, Becky. And your team immediately went to—yes—the cyber risk, which we’ve already touched on. They then went quickly to the fact that, really across the insurance businesses—and it’s that building concept that we’re very focused on—how do we become more efficient in creating code and managing it? They immediately went to that aspect of it, and then, as you touched on, becoming more productive, more efficient. And they went as far to say—I thought the example was really good—I mean, if we were looking at a risk and we had our traditional underwriters doing it, we might have looked at the five largest risks, and your team highlighted that now we can, pretty much in a fairly quick way... yes, we focus on those, but we’ll get a very quick view on others using technology. We’ll probably look at those other 15 risks and have a strong view on it. Is that fair?
Ajit Jain: Yep, that’s it exactly.
Greg Abel: So using it within the businesses but well aware it’s evolving, I think, is a fair way.
Ajit Jain: Yeah.
Greg Abel: So thank you. Thanks, Ajit.
Ajit Jain: Thank you.
Greg Abel: Now formally station one, unless Warren, you’re up there again.
Question (Levia): Hi everyone. My name is Levia and I’m from Irvine, California, born in Kunming, China. And I really want to say it’s my honor to see both Mr. Buffett and Mr. Abel today. I really want to say Mr. Buffett, your speech has helped me get through many, many dark moments in my life and stand back up—not only in investment. I really appreciate you. Okay, my question is: as a young investor navigating both uncertainty and rapid technology change, I often struggle to balance patience with action. How would you personally distinguish between the two, please?
Greg Abel: Sure. I think one of our greatest strengths at Berkshire is patience and being disciplined when it comes to allocating our capital. There will be opportunities that come over time, and for yourself—and it doesn’t mean there’s not opportunities now, but it doesn’t mean you need to deploy all your capital or spend all your money right now. And that’s really our approach we take every day, and we recognize we’ve got a significant asset in our cash and US treasuries, using ourselves as an example. And I would think of the cash you’re holding as that, and that’s an asset. It’s a great opportunity. You’ll feel the moment, or feel there’s a strong value proposition with an opportunity.
When do we see those? We’ve outlined our investment philosophies which is, one, we very much have to understand what we’re investing in. So we want to have a strong... it can be you touched on technology and the things you’re seeing there and the evolution and how fast it’s all changing. I always start with, and I know we always have at Berkshire: do we understand this business? Do we understand the opportunity? And more importantly, do we understand the risks? Then we want to have a very understandable view of what the economic prospects look like for the next 5, 10 years. Not—yes, the next year matters—but we’re not in that investment for a year. It has to be a long-term view of where that opportunity will go.
We take it one step further: we’re going to be in these investments forever. So we think that way, and we like to have a strong view on the management team—that they’re capable and operate with high integrity. And if we can get to that position, but the most important one being then, at the end, the value has to work for us to deploy our capital. We’re not anxious to just deploy capital into subpar opportunities. We want to know it meets our principles and then we’ll, as I said earlier, act decisively, both quickly and with significant capital. Anything you’d like to [add]?
Ajit Jain: No.
Greg Abel: Thank you, Becky.
Becky Quick: Oh, this question is for Greg, and it comes from Mark Lunder in Miami who says he’s been a Berkshire shareholder for 30 years. He said: "Greg, given your background as a business operator, which differs from Warren’s roots as a public market investor, could you share how you balance your time between overseeing the wholly-owned subsidiaries and the $288 billion—now—equity portfolio? Also, does your operator lens change how you evaluate new investment opportunities compared to Warren’s historical approach?"
Greg Abel: Thank you, Becky. So, obviously, yes—the many years of operating a variety of Berkshire Hathaway Energy and then in the role of the Vice Chairman of non-insurance operations. Fortunately, Ajit and I were in those co-roles for the past eight years—nine years now. But that created a very significant opportunity for myself personally to understand those businesses, and as I’ve already touched on, we have exceptional businesses, exceptional leadership there, but there’s still opportunities there. But I’ll spend a certain amount of time associated with those businesses and make sure we’re allocating our capital properly, and we’re still thinking about risk across those businesses and encouraging operational excellence.
Because, listen, having been inside a business, it’s easy to look at your internal metrics and convince yourself you’re doing okay, and you have to look outside and say, "Well, what is the customer seeing, feeling? What are our competitors doing?" and I think that’s what we can bring on the operational side. I’ve touched on bringing Adam Johnson on, or him taking on the incremental role across 32 businesses; he’ll bring that great operating knowledge. And we have Ajit on the insurance side.
Now, when it comes to the equity portfolio—and again, allocating time—still we have significant opportunities there as we look at deploying our capital that’s on the balance sheet, and I shared where our cash and US treasuries were. I would highlight, if you think of our equity portfolio as it exists today—I articulated this in the letter—it’s in a very... we have a concentrated portfolio. And we highlighted that by calling it Across the Core, but the best name is really a concentrated portfolio of investments. And we had our Core Four. You concentrated investments I highlighted in the letter; we have our Japanese investments. And it’s interesting if you then go to the next number of companies where we have positions that are very significant.
