Warren Buffett prints his in the shareholder letter, in plain English, with his name on it. For most of the past decade, the story around Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) (BRK.B) and its industrial businesses was maintenance rather than growth. Railroads, utilities, insurance float, a slow grind of cash into the same pile.
The exciting money went somewhere else. It went into chips, cloud contracts and anything with a graphics processing unit bolted to it. That framing skipped a physical step.
Before one chip in a new data center draws a watt, somebody has to build the machine that produces the watt. And the hottest, most stressed piece inside that machine is a cast slab of superalloy that only a handful of companies on earth know how to pour without cracking it. One of those companies belongs to Buffett.
It is the deal he apologized for. Precision Castparts, the aerospace parts maker Berkshire bought in 2016, has spent 2026 turning into something nobody underwrote at the time. It is an AI power story hiding inside a conglomerate that doesn't talk about it.
Berkshire paid roughly $37.2 billion for Precision Castparts a decade ago, the largest deal of Buffett's career at that point. Then commercial aviation stopped. Berkshire wrote down about $11 billion of the value, and Buffett told shareholders he had simply paid "too much," according to CNBC.
Go back to that letter and the complaint is narrower than the coverage suggested. He faulted the price he paid. He did not fault the asset, which he called the best in its business.
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