Warren Buffett’s letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, dated February 22, 2025, looks beyond the year’s results to explain how Berkshire thinks about mistakes, insurance risk, capital allocation and succession. Berkshire reported $47.437 billion in 2024 operating earnings, but Buffett’s larger message was about how the company deploys capital and communicates with its owners.
What Buffett’s 2024 letter says—and when it was written
The document commonly called Warren Buffett’s “2024 annual letter” is his letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders included in the company’s 2024 annual report. It is dated February 22, 2025, and signed by Buffett as chairman of the board. Its figures generally describe fiscal 2024; forecasts and statements about future leadership reflect what Buffett expected when he wrote it.
The letter is a management reflection as much as an earnings recap. Buffett discusses business and investment errors, insurance economics, the value of retained earnings, Berkshire’s holdings and its shareholder meeting. He repeatedly returns to candor: leaders should recognize and address a mistake rather than let discomfort delay a correction. Recalling Forest River founder Pete Liegl’s sale of his company to Berkshire, Buffett presents the relationship as an example of direct, trust-based dealings with an owner-manager; that anecdote is Buffett’s account.
How Berkshire’s 2024 operating earnings changed
Berkshire reported $47.437 billion in operating earnings for 2024, compared with $37.350 billion in 2023. Buffett distinguishes this measure from GAAP earnings: Berkshire’s operating-earnings measure excludes realized and unrealized capital gains and losses on stocks and bonds, which can cause reported results to swing sharply from year to year. It should not be read as net income.
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The figures below are in millions of dollars, as reported in Berkshire’s letter.
| Operating-earnings category | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Insurance underwriting | $9,020 | $5,428 |
| Insurance investment income | $13,670 | $9,567 |
| BNSF | $5,031 | $5,087 |
| Berkshire Hathaway Energy | $3,730 | $2,331 |
| Other controlled businesses | $13,072 | $13,362 |
| Non-controlled businesses | $1,519 | $1,750 |
| Other | $1,395 | -$175 |
| Total | $47,437 | $37,350 |
Insurance made the clearest contribution to the increase. Buffett said GEICO’s improvement was substantial, crediting Todd Combs with improving efficiency and updating underwriting practices. He also said aggregate earnings at Berkshire’s railroad and utility operations improved, while noting that work remained. Late in 2024, Berkshire increased its ownership of its utility operation from about 92% to 100% at a cost of roughly $3.9 billion: $2.9 billion in cash and the balance in Class B shares.
What Buffett said about Berkshire’s taxes and dividends
Buffett reported that Berkshire made four payments to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service totaling $26.8 billion for 2024—about 5% of what all U.S. corporations paid, by his account. He also said Berkshire paid income taxes to foreign governments and 44 states. These are figures reported by Buffett in the shareholder letter.
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- Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders: 1965 - 2014
Berkshire paid one cash dividend to shareholders during 1965–2024: $101,755, equal to 10 cents per Class A share, on January 3, 1967. Buffett’s argument is that retaining and reinvesting earnings helped build Berkshire over time and contributed to the company’s accumulated tax payments.
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Why the cash balance does not tell the whole capital-allocation story
Buffett describes Berkshire as owning businesses outright as well as holding partial stakes in public companies, including Apple, American Express and Coca-Cola. The market value of its marketable-equity holdings fell from $354 billion to $272 billion over 2024. At the same time, Buffett said Berkshire’s non-quoted controlled businesses were worth more than its marketable-equity portfolio.
That distinction matters when interpreting headlines about Berkshire’s cash. Buffett said the great majority of shareholders’ money remained invested in equities when controlled businesses are included, and that Berkshire would continue to prefer ownership of good businesses to cash-equivalent assets. The reported decline in marketable holdings, by itself, does not establish why Berkshire sold any particular security.
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How insurance float works—and why it can be risky
Buffett calls property-casualty insurance Berkshire’s core business. Insurers receive premiums before they know the full cost of many claims. The interval between collecting premiums and paying claims gives an insurer “float” to invest. But float is not automatically cheap or risk-free: if an insurer charges too little or sets inadequate reserves, losses can remain hidden for years.
That risk is especially acute in long-tail lines such as medical malpractice and product liability, where claims may emerge long after a policy is written. Buffett noted that Berkshire was still making substantial payments on asbestos exposures dating back 50 years or more.
His stated discipline is to price for risk and reduce business when premiums are inadequate, rather than underprice policies to preserve market share. In his words, “We must never write inadequately-priced policies in order to stay in the game.” He also quoted Mike Goldberg, the executive who recruited Ajit Jain, saying, “We want our underwriters to daily come to work nervous, but not paralyzed.”
For the previous two decades, Buffett said, Berkshire’s insurance business generated $32 billion in after-tax underwriting profits—about 3.3 cents per dollar of sales after income tax—while float grew from $46 billion to $171 billion. He described float as potentially costless when underwriting is intelligent and luck cooperates, not as guaranteed free funding. The letter also said property-casualty pricing strengthened in 2024, reflecting increased damage from convective storms, and warned that a severe insurance loss could occur at any time. Buffett’s comments about climate change are his qualified remarks in the letter, not an independent attribution of those losses.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What Berkshire’s Japanese investments looked like at year-end 2024
Berkshire’s five Japanese trading-company investments were ITOCHU, Marubeni, Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo. Buffett said Berkshire began buying them in July 2019, valued their management and capital allocation, and intended to hold the positions for the long term.
| Measure | Berkshire’s five Japanese investments |
|---|---|
| Aggregate cost at year-end 2024 | $13.8 billion |
| Aggregate market value at year-end 2024 | $23.5 billion |
| Ownership limit described in the letter | Below 10% in each company; the companies agreed to a moderate relaxation as Berkshire approached that level |
| Expected 2025 dividend income, as forecast in the February 22, 2025 letter | About $812 million |
| Expected 2025 interest cost on yen debt, as forecast in the February 22, 2025 letter | About $135 million |
The dividend and interest figures are forecasts Buffett gave in February 2025, not realized results for that year. He also discussed yen-denominated borrowing and currency-neutral positioning as part of the investment structure.
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What the letter says about succession and shareholders
When Buffett wrote the 2024 letter, he said Greg Abel would succeed him as CEO and write future annual letters. That was a forward-looking statement at the time. Berkshire’s 2025 annual report, dated February 28, 2026, is signed by Abel as CEO and is his first annual letter in that role. Abel describes the letters and annual meetings as expressions of Berkshire’s partnership with owners and says the company intends to preserve its shareholder-oriented culture. Read Berkshire’s 2025 annual report.
The 2024 letter also discusses the annual gathering in Omaha and the value of direct questions from shareholders. Buffett’s emphasis on communicating with owners fits the letter’s wider theme: explain decisions plainly, acknowledge mistakes and take action when circumstances require it.
Read the full letter
The complete letter is available as a PDF from Berkshire Hathaway’s official 2024 annual report. The company’s shareholder-letter archive provides letters by year and notes that a book containing the full, unedited letters from 1965 through 2024 is available for sale.
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