I share your same viewpoint. My take is that Berkshire's historical value proposition which you described is falling apart and its traditional investments are giving way as it gradually transitions to kind of just being another hedge fund plus a handful of other golden geese like BNSF.

Honestly Berkshire's management of the companies it wholly owns has been surprisingly bad lately. They've been taken over by narcissistic internal parasites, the same people who always chase prestige and money. Buffett and Munger have lost control of the ship and are not able to prevent the internal rot. This isn't reflected in their share price because SO much of their share price is just AAPL (currently APPL composes 20% of their market cap, was even more before AAPL prices dropped in the tech crash)

Look at Lubrizol, with three CEO's in less than a year. Berkshire installed Chris Brown, formerly the COO of Detroit for <2 years (both "Detroit" and "<2 years" are very strong anti-signals...). He got into yelling matches with front-line lowest-level engineers over tiny projects (<$3 million) that he wanted to micromanage and was quickly let go for what people presume were "HR issues" (bit of a euphemism there, his replacement is a woman). His behavioral issues and "emotionally charged leadership" with all types of employees were obvious -- front and center, constantly.

The damning part is how did Berkshire appoint a guy that bad? Where are the internal controls?

It wasn't just the CEO either. Berkshire ended up replacing basically the entire C-suite in less than a year. [2] vs. [3]. Don Grafton as head of Operations was also a complete disaster for similar reasons, minus the rumored HR violations. He constantly refused common sense ROI improvement proposals and critical maintenance projects, but approved and championed really dumb high-capital, low ROI work and micromanaged down to the level of "The storage tank needs to be this size and shape." At no other large company would the projects that he micromanaged even have been reviewed for approval by the C-suite. They were shockingly low-level, low-impact work, far below what C-suites should even be aware of, let alone spending half their time on.

I've heard better things about the current CEO but Brown was so bad that "better" is pretty relative.

Plus the new CEO has very little to work with at this point due to truly unbelievable attrition. The C-suite told everyone in an all-hands sitewide roundtable "We're not adjusting salaries for inflation, if you feel you're underpaid then find another job". About 1/3rd of the Lubrizol engineers took them up on that and now its pretty bleak inside their plants with a huge loss of expertise and nothing replacing it. Multiple people who worked there (people from both their HQ in Ohio and also in their largest chemical plant in Texas) have told me they can't come up with a single colleague that they professionally respected who didn't leave and move on.

They've had two huge industrial accidents in that time which, in this case, was a direct result of top-level mismanagement and failure to invest in maintaining equipment and failure to retain any of their top talent. Rouen, France [0]. Rockton, IL [1]. It's not clear that France will even let them re-open the plant, its rumored they've lost their "license to operate" there. "License to operate" isn't a literal technical thing, its an industry term for the confluence/totality of all political and regulatory barriers to proceed with construction and operation of facilities in a particular jurisdiction.

It doesn't reflect well on the board of directors at all.

I will say the new CEO is focusing hard on attracting new top talent and looking at grand improvement projects and potential restructuring deals to change up ownership of particular production units. She's making the right moves now but it's a really, really tough place to begin from.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubrizol_factory_fire_in_Rouen

1: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2021/6/25/22549407/chemtool-che...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20211208153334/https://www.lubri...

3: https://www.lubrizol.com/Our-Company/CEO-and-Leadership/Lead...