The Omaha Experience – attending the annual shareholders meeting of Berkshire Hathaway - Part 2

Previous part 1 of this series is here. Continuing further..

Preparation to Attend

So, first of all, what does it take to attend the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting?

1.??????? It is held on a date announced well ahead of time, in Omaha in Nebraska. For example, the date for the 2025 event is Saturday May 3, 2025, and is already announced, nearly a year in advance. Omaha is one of the smaller cities of the USA located bang in the middle of the country, with not a whole lot of other attractions nearby, beyond this event. With the limited infrastructure in terms of hotels etc., as a large number of people descend on the city for this event, good hotels do tend to fill up soon, and rooms get expensive. So, the first thing to do if you intend to go, is to work out a tentative schedule of travel and book the hotel or Airbnb etc.

2.??????? While entry to the event is free, it is restricted to shareholders and their friends/ family. You could choose to purchase a share and become a shareholder and ask for passes for yourself, or you can find a friend who owns a Berkshire Hathaway share and ask the friend to get the passes, which you can use. Just for information, the Berkshire Hathaway original Class A stock (BRK.A) is mighty high priced, at around USD 600,000 a piece!! Yes, you read it right. 600K for one share! The stock has not seen any stock split and all the value of the business has continued to be retained and captured into the stock price! However, there IS a mini-Berkshire or a Berkshire Hathaway Class B stock that they created a few years back, and which runs at around USD 400 each, and which may be more accessible and affordable, if you wish to purchase one and look for shareholder passes. Shareholder passes are available, even on the Class B shares, and each shareholder can ask for and get up to 4 passes, so 4 persons can attend the event. While you need to figure out and purchase a share if you wish to go that route, or find a friend who is a shareholder and who is willing to arrange passes for you, the actual request for the passes can usually be done only about a month or so, ahead of the event.

3.??????? Planning the travel: The event usually happens on a Saturday and starts early morning on that day. So, you need to plan to reach at least a day ahead of time. Omaha is a mid-sized city and is not super well-connected to the rest of the US, in terms of number of direct flights from various other larger cities. Hence, you need to plan the travels in advance. While the actual meeting starts on the Saturday morning and gets over the same evening, there are some related events that happen on the previous day (some even a few days ahead), and it may be useful to reach say, on Thursday, or at least on the Friday morning, prior to the event. You can then look up and try to attend some other investor meets that happen, or even try and catch up with some other investors who arrive for the meeting. It is a good atmosphere to seep in, on the day before. Many also pay a visit to the humble abode of Warren Buffett on that previous day. There is a large expo of investee companies of Berkshire Hathaway that happens along with the meet, and which is also open the previous day on Friday. One can take time to move around the expo, also on Friday.

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My Visit – seeping in the surround sound in Omaha

I flew into Omaha from San Francisco. I took the red eye flight on Thursday night and got into Omaha on Friday morning. Not the most convenient of schedules, taking the red eye flight, that too one that had a stopover in Denver, but somehow, as I viewed my options, this one was the best, in the sense that it gave me most of Friday in Omaha, before the meet on Saturday.

I was fortunate to have a friend of mine from the SF Bay Area, Jawahar 'Joe' Samagond, joining me on this trip, so we travelled together from SFO.

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One of the investor events that I had heard about, was a talk by Mohnish Pabrai, which was happening on Friday morning, at the University of Nebraska campus in Omaha. Mohnish has been very close to Buffett and Munger, runs his own and extremely successful investment business, and has been known to have completely cloned the Buffett model, getting enormous success while doing so. He is a well-known and highly respected speaker. His event on Friday was shown to have been “sold out” (in the sense that the registrations were not open anymore – it was a free event otherwise), but thanks to the suggestion from Vishal Khandelwal (Safal Niveshak), I decided to go and take my chances. Travelling to this event, straight from the airport, we reached just in time, and had the pleasure of listening to Pabrai’s thoughts and also enjoy a lively Q&A that he held there.

We also went to the event centre and spent some time at the expo. It was so mighty impressive to see the many successful brands and businesses, which are part of Berkshire’s investments, and who had taken booths in the expo, e.g. Geico, Netjets, See’s Candies, Brooks, Duracell, Bose, Dairy Queen, Pilot, Borsheims and so many others. One can only marvel at Buffett’s acumen to have identified and picked these businesses very early and seen enormous growth via these businesses. Several of these were selling their products as well as merchandise for the 2024 event and one just could not resist from picking up some stuff. In fact, See’s Candies is one of the busiest booths at the expo and is estimated to sell more than 10 tons of their product, over the 2 days!

We drove around Omaha, meeting an investor at a beautiful country club there, paying our respects at the very modest Buffett home and hitting the Old Market area of Omaha, to hang out for some drinks and food. We met up another group of investors there.

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All in all, Omaha appeared to be a nice, decent sized city of middle America, with very decent people (as represented by the many Uber drivers we connected to, as well as the staff at restaurants etc that we met), a nice countryside, the mighty Missouri river running by the city.

?Read part 3 of the series: The BIG Day!

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