Warren Buffett built a myth around patience. Greg Abel has now inherited the largest pile of idle capital in corporate history: $377 billion in cash. This quarter, Berkshire's big move was to spend $9.6 billion buying itself.
To be fair, the defense is serious. Buybacks below intrinsic value make sense, Berkshire pays no dividend, and the company does plow billions into its railroad and utilities each year. Berkshire is also among the country's biggest corporate taxpayers, which is more than most of its peers can say. But the defense concedes the larger point. The most celebrated capital allocator in America cannot find enough worthwhile things to build, buy or fix, so the cash piles up and the shares get retired. That should trouble anyone who thinks capitalism's job is to turn savings into things people need.
Meanwhile, Berkshire owns things people need. It owns BNSF, a spine of the national freight system. It owns Berkshire Hathaway Energy, whose utilities (PacifiCorp, MidAmerican, NV Energy) hold monopoly franchises across the West and Midwest. These are not ordinary companies competing for customers. They are regulated monopolies, granted by the public and paid for by captive ratepayers. When a conglomerate with that much power sits on a mountain of cash, the public is entitled to ask why the grid and the rails are not getting more of it.
The PacifiCorp record sharpens the question. The utility has faced enormous wildfire liabilities in the West, including a major Oregon jury verdict over the 2020 fires. A company with $377 billion on hand could treat grid hardening and wildfire safety as the cost of holding a monopoly. Instead, the history of utility wildfire fights is a history of pushing costs outward, toward ratepayers, regulators and taxpayers, and arguing about who owes what.
Then came Abel's cheerful note that BHE sees opportunities to power data centers. Read that as a Left reader should. The AI building boom is creating enormous new electricity demand, and the open question is who absorbs the risk. If a utility builds generation and transmission for a handful of tech giants, and the demand softens or the chips change, the stranded costs land in the rate base. That means they land on a retiree in Des Moines or a family in Salt Lake City, who never signed a contract with a hyperscaler.
That is the real test of this story. Abel can answer it in a sentence: will data centers pay the full cost of the capacity built for them, on long-term contracts with minimum-take guarantees, or will households share the bill? Regulators in BHE's territories should demand that answer in writing, in public rate cases, before a single new plant goes into the rate base.
The labor record deserves the same scrutiny. BNSF and its peers have spent years running leaner railroads with fewer workers and tighter schedules, and in the 2022 national bargaining fight the industry resisted paid sick leave for workers who haul the country's goods. Buybacks are, among other things, a decision about where margin goes: to the people who run the trains and the lines, or to the shareholders whose stake grows as the share count shrinks.
None of this makes Berkshire a villain by Wall Street standards. By those standards it is a model citizen, and that is the point. The best-behaved giant in American finance still treats its public-facing monopolies as cash engines feeding a stock-retirement program. If this is what restraint looks like, the system is not working as promised.
The Left should not be asking Buffett's successor for charity. It should be asking for terms: investment commitments tied to monopoly franchises, data-center costs kept off household bills, and wildfire safety treated as a first claim on profits. Berkshire has the money. Public regulators have the leverage. Voters should find out which one is being used.
How it may affect me
If you get power from a Berkshire Hathaway Energy utility (PacifiCorp, MidAmerican Energy or NV Energy), watch your state's rate cases and large-load tariff proceedings. Those filings show whether data centers are paying for the capacity built for them or whether the costs are being spread across household bills. Public comment periods are open to ordinary customers.
