Berkshire Hathaway and its operating subsidiaries employed approximately 387,800 people worldwide at the end of 2025. In his first letter to shareholders, Greg Abel, who became Chief Executive Officer on 1 January 2026, described Berkshire's culture as resting on nearly 400,000 employees, and set out the group's approach to its 51 non-insurance operating businesses: there are no layers of management and no goals or targets allocated by Berkshire, because each business is accountable to its own CEO.
Read that as a seller and the whole account changes shape. There is no Berkshire technology budget to win. There is no group CIO, no enterprise agreement, no master services agreement that unlocks 400,000 seats. Berkshire's own Form 10-K states that its operating subsidiaries are managed on an unusually decentralized basis and that there are few centralized or integrated business functions. The thing most reps treat as the prize, a single corporate relationship, does not exist here.
What exists instead is roughly seventy separately run companies, each of which buys like the mid-market or enterprise business it actually is.
How the buying process actually runs
There is no corporate supplier portal. Berkshire's own website carries links to annual reports, governance, news releases, the shareholder meeting and the operating companies. It carries no procurement page, no supplier registration, no vendor diversity programme. The site tells visitors plainly that, because of the limited number of personnel in the corporate office, it cannot provide a direct response to enquiries. That is the most honest procurement guidance any company this size publishes.
The subsidiaries run their own. BNSF publishes a supplier section with its own supplier portal registration, a supplier pre-assessment request form and a materials purchasing reference guide. Precision Castparts publishes CP-002, its Supplier Quality Requirements, which runs to dozens of pages and requires a signed signature page agreed with the contracting site quality manager, plus written notice before a supplier relocates production or moves work between facilities. GEICO runs B2B and vendor online services for the partners it works with. None of these processes talk to each other. Being an approved supplier to one is worth nothing at the next.
Security review is per business group, not per company. Berkshire's Item 1C cybersecurity disclosure describes a framework that permits each Berkshire Business Group to tailor its own approach based on its own assessment of its own risks, with each Business Group's Chief Information Security Officer reporting annually to that group's senior management. Practically: you will pass security review more than once, to different people, against different standards, for the same product.
Insurance adds a regulator on top. Berkshire's insurance operations employed approximately 42,600 people at the end of 2025 across GEICO, the Berkshire Hathaway Primary Group and the Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group. GEICO writes on an admitted basis, uses its own claims staff, and its 10-K notes that state insurance departments stringently regulate private passenger auto policies and rates. If your product touches rating, claims handling or policyholder data, the review is a filed-and-regulated one, and it belongs to that carrier, not to Omaha.
Who owns what, so you know where your deal belongs
You will not be selling to these people. Their remit tells you which part of the group your deal sits in, and which subsidiary CEO you actually need.
| Name | Role | What it means for a vendor |
|---|---|---|
| Gregory E. Abel | President and Chief Executive Officer | Retains direct oversight of industrial products, building products, BNSF, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Pilot and McLane |
| Ajit Jain | Vice Chairman, Insurance Operations | The insurance side of the house, where GEICO, the primary group and the reinsurance group sit |
| Adam M. Johnson | President, Consumer Products, Service and Retailing; CEO of NetJets | Supports the CEOs of 32 consumer products, service and retailing businesses, appointed December 2025 |
| Charles C. Chang | Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer | Took the role on 1 June 2026, succeeding Marc D. Hamburg, who retires in 2027. Previously CFO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy |
| Michael J. O'Sullivan | Senior Vice President and General Counsel | Berkshire's first General Counsel, a newly created post effective 1 January 2026. The corporation had for decades primarily used external counsel |
Warren E. Buffett remains Chairman. He was Chief Executive Officer from 1970 through the end of 2025.
Names taken from Berkshire Hathaway's own news releases, 2026 proxy statement and 2025 shareholder letter, verified 11 September 2026. Senior roles change. Verify at source before using any name.
Why you cannot sell into this account from the bottom, and why the arithmetic is upside down
At most Global 500 accounts the problem is that your deal is too small for the C-suite. At Berkshire the problem is the reverse. There is no entity that can sign a group-wide deal, so the largest contract available to you is whatever one subsidiary will spend.
That has two consequences. First, the approver you need is not in Omaha, it is the CEO of a single operating business, because Abel's letter is explicit that accountability sits with that CEO. Second, your account plan is not one pursuit, it is a portfolio of them. BNSF Railway alone had approximately 35,000 employees at the end of 2025, Berkshire Hathaway Energy employs approximately 24,000, and the manufacturing businesses employ approximately 175,600 between them. Selling to three of those is three sales cycles, three security reviews and three sets of commercials, and nothing you learn in one transfers automatically to the next except your logo.
Reps who treat Berkshire as one account produce a pipeline entry that never closes. Reps who treat it as a segment build a repeatable motion.
The layer that matters is below the public names, and here it is unusually hard to map
Berkshire's own list of operating companies runs to 68 businesses. That understates it. Marmon Holdings is one line on that page, and Marmon by itself comprises eleven business groups and more than 120 autonomous manufacturing and service businesses operating from roughly 630 manufacturing, distribution and service facilities in the United States and 19 other countries.
So the people who can sponsor a purchase number in the hundreds, and almost none of them appear on a single leadership page anywhere, because there is no single leadership page. There is no group directory, no shared email domain convention, no common job architecture. A list of Berkshire technology decision makers is not something you can download. It has to be assembled subsidiary by subsidiary and it decays.
That is the first real problem at this account. Multithreading here does not mean three contacts in one company. It means three contacts in each of several companies that do not report to each other.
The board is a published second-degree map
The 2026 proxy statement nominated thirteen directors, and their other affiliations are public and checkable. Read the list as a target map rather than as trivia.
- Stephen B. Burke is a director of JPMorgan Chase and founded Madison Valley Partners in 2020. He was formerly Chairman and CEO of NBCUniversal from 2011 to 2020 and formerly President of Comcast Cable.
- Kenneth I. Chenault is Chairman and a Managing Director of General Catalyst and a director of Airbnb. He was formerly CEO of American Express from 2001 to 2018, and formerly a director of IBM and Procter and Gamble.
- Christopher C. Davis is Chairman of Davis Advisors and a director of The Coca-Cola Company and Graham Holdings Company.
- Susan L. Decker is Berkshire's lead independent director, CEO and founder of Raftr, and a director of Costco Wholesale, Vail Resorts, Chime and Automattic. She was formerly President and formerly Chief Financial Officer of Yahoo.
- Charlotte Guyman is a director of Nordstrom and of Landings Holdings, and a trustee of Lakeside School. She was formerly a general manager at Microsoft until 1999.
- Thomas S. Murphy, Jr. is a partner of Crestview Partners, which he co-founded in 2004, and serves on the boards of New York University and NYU Langone Health. He was formerly a partner at Goldman Sachs.
- Wallace R. Weitz founded Weitz Investment Management and is a director of Cable One.
- Meryl B. Witmer is a managing member of the General Partner of Eagle Capital Partners.
- Howard G. Buffett is Chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Susan A. Buffett chairs The Sherwood Foundation and The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. Warren E. Buffett is Chairman, Gregory E. Abel is CEO and Ajit Jain is Vice Chairman, Insurance Operations.
If anyone in your network is senior at JPMorgan Chase, General Catalyst, Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Graham Holdings, Costco, Vail Resorts, Chime, Automattic, Nordstrom, Cable One, Crestview Partners, Eagle Capital, Davis Advisors or Weitz Investment Management, there is a two-hop path to a Berkshire director. A Berkshire director has no operational authority over a subsidiary's purchasing, but can tell you which business your product belongs in and make the call credible when it lands.
Other connector routes, and one that is missing
There is no corporate alumni network. Unlike most companies of this size, Berkshire operates no official alumni programme, which removes a channel sellers lean on elsewhere. What replaces it is the acquisition history. Almost every business in the group arrived by purchase, from See's Candies to Alleghany to Pilot, and those pre-acquisition relationships are intact and largely unmapped.
Your customers in the same subsidiary's industry, not in Berkshire. A reference from another Class I railroad is worth more to BNSF than a reference from another Berkshire company. A reference from another admitted auto carrier is worth more to GEICO. Berkshire is a shareholder, not a peer group.
Finding which of these paths actually exists inside your own company's relationships is what a relationship intelligence platform is for. At an account with no central directory, the odds that a usable path exists and nobody has looked are higher than almost anywhere else.
And then you have to get to your own connector
Suppose the strongest route runs through one of your own board members who knows a Berkshire director. That is a serious asset and close to unrepeatable. You have to get that person to prioritise it, write something credible, and spend a piece of a relationship built over years on you. Ask twice in a quarter and you will not be asked again.
The Berkshire twist makes this worse than usual. Because the group is 51 non-insurance businesses plus a set of insurers, the temptation is to ask the same connector for several introductions at once. That is the fastest way to burn the connector. Pick one subsidiary, win it, and let the result buy the next ask.
Three rules for the introduction itself
Name the operating company, never the parent. "An introduction to whoever owns claims technology at GEICO" is actionable. "An introduction to Berkshire Hathaway" tells your connector nothing and will be quietly dropped. The buying committee you need sits inside one subsidiary.
Write the paragraph your connector will forward. They will not write your pitch, and at this account they also need a line explaining why this business and not another one. The forwardable blurb is the whole craft.
A warm path starts the clock, it does not skip it. You will still complete that subsidiary's supplier registration, that Business Group's security review, and in insurance whatever the state filings require. What you gain is a conversation with the person who owns the problem and the budget, months earlier than cold outreach would produce.
See the warm paths into Berkshire Hathaway
Everything above describes the problem: no central technology buyer at all, and dozens of subsidiaries that each buy alone. What it does not tell you is which of your own relationships already reaches inside. That is a question about your network, not theirs, and it is the one most teams answer from memory.
Boomerang maps the warm paths your company already has into accounts like Berkshire Hathaway, across your team, your customers, your board and investors, and your partners. It then drafts the ask, routes it through the right connector and tracks it to a booked meeting. Book a 15-minute walkthrough and see it run against your own target accounts.
Frequently asked questions
Who makes technology buying decisions at Berkshire Hathaway?
The operating subsidiaries do. Berkshire's Form 10-K states that its subsidiaries are managed on an unusually decentralized basis with few centralized or integrated business functions, and Greg Abel's 2025 shareholder letter says the 51 non-insurance operating businesses receive no allocated goals or targets from Berkshire and are accountable to their own CEOs. In practice the decision maker sits inside GEICO, BNSF, Precision Castparts, Marmon or another subsidiary, not at the corporate office in Omaha.
Does Berkshire Hathaway have a supplier portal or vendor registration process?
Not at the corporate level. Berkshire's own website publishes reports, governance material and links to the operating companies, and no procurement or supplier registration section. The subsidiaries publish their own. BNSF operates a supplier portal with a supplier pre-assessment request form, Precision Castparts publishes its CP-002 Supplier Quality Requirements, and GEICO runs its own B2B and vendor services. Approval at one carries no weight at another.
How big is Berkshire Hathaway's corporate office?
Small enough that the company says so publicly. Berkshire's website states that because of the limited number of personnel in its corporate office it cannot provide a direct response to enquiries. The corporate function is capital allocation, governance and leadership appointments. Berkshire appointed its first ever General Counsel, Michael J. O'Sullivan, effective 1 January 2026, having for decades primarily used outside counsel for corporate matters.
How long does an enterprise sale to a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary take?
Assume a full enterprise cycle per subsidiary, and assume you repeat it. Berkshire's cybersecurity disclosure describes a framework under which each Business Group tailors its own approach and each Business Group's Chief Information Security Officer reports to that group's own senior management. On the insurance side, state insurance departments stringently regulate private passenger auto policies and rates, so anything touching rating or claims carries a regulatory review as well.
Is there a Berkshire Hathaway alumni network?
Not an official corporate one, which is unusual for a group employing approximately 387,800 people. The equivalent asset is the acquisition history: nearly every business in the group arrived by purchase, so pre-acquisition colleague relationships run through companies such as See's Candies, Precision Castparts, Alleghany, Marmon and Pilot. Those relationships are real and almost never mapped by the companies selling into the account.
