For better or worse, this is the stuff you need personal connections with industry insiders to get the scoop on. The chemical industry doesn't have anything like [0] to get internal scoops so these stories are not published anywhere.
It's one of those "go to the right school and know the people in the room" things. Everything I've mentioned is stuff that tons of low-level people are fully knowledgeable about and commonly known to the chemical engineering community around Houston, but I also know people who work with the C-suite and these issues are absolutely reflecting in the top-level business reporting as well. Which I could be bullshitting because when you see "The direct economic consequences resulted from companies partially ceasing their activity (e.g. neighboring chemical manufacturers in the area, and/or customers, or suppliers, etc) and farmers that had to destroy their harvests." in Wikipedia, any business intelligence service could do some research to estimate the potential damages and obviously these things "would reflect in the top-level business reporting as well", whatever that means.
One of BRK's huge advantages is its ability to obfuscate individual company performance in combination with its historical reputation for excellence. Its quarterly reports don't break out how well each company performs so if AAPL goes up 25% it makes up for a lot of mismanagement and performance issues across BRK's portfolio companies. So people just assume its constituent subsidiaries are continuing to be managed well.
But BRK has a huge influence on rail regulation, and we can also see how forward-thinking they are there as well. Inferences can be made from the risky practices they're implementing and what reliability innovations they're resisting. Who in the upcoming generation are going to want to go into the rail industry? Even for the degreed civil or transportation engineers, the rail industry lifestyle is now unappealing when compared to other markets they can apply their talents. The pay absolutely doesn't make up for the constant travel and lack of any social life, unlike, say oilfield engineering compensation which has a similar lifestyle.
That said, do I think BNSF is at risk for losses? No. They clearly fit the BRK model of a business with a "natural moat" and in these times of extremely constrained shipping capacity, they will be able to charge whatever they need to, in order to maintain healthy BNSF profitability. The point is more:
1) This is a concerning pattern in how BRK manages its subsidiaries. Some of its other holdings won't be able to tolerate it and stay above water.
2) Some of the individual things are so bad and reflect on BRK so directly (appointment of obviously terrible C-suite leaders) that it's prima facie evidence of BRK deterioration. We would need strong counter-evidence to reject that conclusion.
I attended the annual meeting last year and though I historically love the company, came away less than impressed. I can see how people in the past would take a pay cut to work closely with WB or have him invest in their company. But does Greg Abel really have anywhere near the kind of gravitas necessary to attract top talent or get good deals? I don't see it. Lots of bland corporatespeak from him.
