In Buffett’s final year as CEO, Berkshire Hathaway is on track to lag behind the S&P 500.

(This is the Warren Buffett Watch newsletter, news and analysis about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Friday night.)

In early May, just before Warren Buffett surprised shareholders by announcing plans to step down as CEO at the end of the year, Berkshire Hathaway’s B stock exceeded the benchmark S&P500 In 2025, it will increase by 22.4 percentage points.

Over the next three months, BRKB fell 14.9% to a closing low of $459.11 after the August 4th meeting.

Since then, it has rebounded 9.9% and closed at $504.34, up 11.3% since the beginning of the year.

However, it was not enough to keep up with the S&P’s 37.9% rise since its year-ending low of 4,982.77 on April 8.

After a four-day winning streak, the index ended today at 6,870.40, just 20 points below its all-time closing high in late October and up 16.8% since the beginning of the year.

That means that with 17 business days left in 2025 and 26 calendar days until Greg Abel takes over as Berkshire’s CEO, Berkshire’s B shares underperform the S&P by 5.5 percentage points.

On October 29th, it fell by 12.2 points, and on November 20th, the tie was still 0.6 points.

But that’s not all, as Buffett likes to compare Berkshire’s stock performance, including dividends, to the S&P.

That pushed the index up an additional 1.4 percentage points, for a total year-to-date gain of 18.2%, outpacing Berkshire by nearly 7 percentage points.

Melinda French Gates says there is still work to be done to achieve the Giving Pledge, which she founded with Bill Gates and her ex-husband Warren Buffett in 2010, to achieve Buffett’s goal of changing “the norms of what is expected of wealthy people.”

The Pledge website states that “more than 250 of the world’s wealthiest philanthropists” have pledged to “give away the majority of their wealth to philanthropy during their lifetime or in their wills.”

“I wish this pledge could have been even more successful than it has been, but this is an issue that we need to continue to work on,” French Gates said on Wired’s The Big Interview podcast this week.

Are those making the pledge “actually giving money”?

“Some of them, yes, some of them are massive. And we are trying to demonstrate through the pledge that you can give on a large scale. But have they given enough? No. You know, some are doing it, some are trying to, or are not ready.”

She acknowledged that getting very wealthy people to start giving away their money is a key issue, in part because “it takes time to find out which organizations you can trust to put your money to good use.”

And if you were to build your own car, “Who can I trust to make sure it’s aligned with my values, aligned with my mission?”

“There are a lot of barriers that keep people from getting started, but we know what they are. Once you get started, you can build a flywheel and that’s what we’re trying to demonstrate to them. Go big. It’s okay to be big, it’s okay to be bold.”

Video: In 2018, Melinda Gates, co-chair and co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, spoke with CNBC’s Becky Quick to discuss how the foundation aims to improve global health and end poverty.

A report released by the Institute for Policy Studies in August argued that the donation pledge was “unfulfilled, unattainable, and not a ticket to a fairer, better future” and that many early pledgers “have become much wealthier since signing.”

A Giving Pledge spokesperson said the report was “misleading” with incomplete data that excluded “significant forms of charitable giving,” including donations to foundations.

Some links may require a subscription.

Mr. Buffett talks about the evaluation of “moat” (1999)

Warren Buffett explains why it’s important to focus on what’s called a company’s “moat,” or its ability to maintain an advantage over its competitors.

Audience: We’d love for you to dig in with us and tell us what are the signs of good management and financial moat for you…

Warren Buffett: Moats and controls are part of the valuation process and feed into our thinking about expected future income streams, actually cash flows, and the degree of certainty that can be attributed to that amount.

So, yeah, it’s an art in terms of business valuation. The formula becomes simple in the end.

But if you and I are each looking at the chewing gum business, and since we don’t own Wrigley, and we use Wrigley quite often in class, pick the number that you think the unit growth rate for chewing gum will be over the next 10 or 20 years.

What are your expectations about how much pricing flexibility there will be and how much risk there is of a dramatic decline in Wrigley’s market share? You can experience it all. That’s what we experience.

So in that case, we’re evaluating the moat. We evaluate price elasticities that interact with moats in specific ways. We are evaluating potential changes in unit demand in the future. We’re evaluating the chances that management is either very smart with the money they’ve developed, or very stupid with it.

And all of that affects our assessment of what that money flow will be over the years.

But the value of that investment will depend on how that trend develops over the next 10 or 20 years.

If you have a large enough moat, it won’t require much maintenance.

You know, this goes back to what Peter Lynch said. “I like to buy businesses that are so good that even an idiot could run them, because sooner or later it will happen.” Well, that’s true — (laughs)

I mean, he was saying the same thing. So he was saying that what he really likes is a business that has a great outside moat, where nothing happens to the outside moat. And there are very few such businesses. But then you’re going to be involved in evaluating all these shadings.

This (Coca-Cola can), not the cherry version, but the regular version, this one has a nice moat. There’s also a moat inside the container.

You know, there was a study done on the percentage of people who could tell what product they were holding just by grabbing the container while blindfolded. And there aren’t many companies that can do as well as Coca-Cola in that regard.

Here are some examples of how the product resonates. If there are 6 billion people in the world, I don’t know what percentage of them have positive thoughts about Coca-Cola, but that number is probably huge.

And the question is: 10 years from now, will that number be even higher, and will the impression be just a little more favorable on average for the billions of people who have it? And that’s what business is all about.

Berkshire’s top U.S. and Japanese listed stocks by market capitalization, based on the latest closing prices.

Holdings are as of September 30, 2025, as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s November 14, 2025 13F filing. However, the following cases are excluded.

A complete list of holdings and current market value is available on CNBC.com’s Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter, please send them to alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, we do not forward questions or comments to Mr. Buffett himself.)

If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter yet, you can sign up here.

I also highly recommend Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders. It’s collected here on Berkshire’s website.

— Alex Crippen, Warren Buffett Watch Editor