Which is the Berkshire within Berkshire? Warren Buffett’s surprising answer

Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Warren Buffett

At the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, shareholder Sean Siegel from Chicago put Warren Buffett on the spot with a question about a hometown favorite.

"Out of all the companies that Berkshire Hathaway owns, there was one that you acquired, the Chicago-based company Portillo's Hot Dogs. How did you know that this would be a good fit for the overall company's portfolio?" Siegel asked.

Buffett, ever candid, admitted: “Well, I’ll have to ask Greg about that because I don’t know anything about it. So maybe he bought it while I was looking the other way. I think I’ve got to call a friend on this one.”

Buffett said he likes to think he knows most of Berkshire’s companies, but added, “It may be a subsidiary of a subsidiary in some way, but I really don’t know a thing about it. I’m sorry. That may be a good thing. I do know something about hot dogs, though.”

Vice Chairman Greg Abel jumped in to clarify: “We do have a lot of companies in Chicago, Warren, through Marmon... But as you noted, I don’t believe Portillo’s falls under that.”

Buffett expanded on that thread: “I look at the financial statements of about, perhaps, 50 or 60 of our companies every month. In the case of Marmon, for example, Marmon itself owns over 100 companies.”

“It was the creature that was created by Jay Pritzker and his brother, Bob. It was a remarkable company when we bought it. But it was highly diversified already, and then we diversified it further.”

“So it is something of a Berkshire within Berkshire,” Buffett said. “And we found that that’s working.”

He also credited the Pritzkers’ legacy: “Jay Pritzker was a remarkable manager... This really goes back to A.N. Pritzker before Jay.”