AS a larger-than-life CEO, Warren Buffett tends to overshadow anything happening within his US$500bil conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Case in point: An entirely inconsequential charity lunch that’s been cancelled between the billionaire and a Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur has gotten far more attention than quarterly earnings report from Berkshire will.

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Berkshire Hathaway is the most valuable company in the world outside of the technology industry, an outlier in a ranking that goes like this: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Berkshire. Only five members of the S&P 500 index generate more free cashflow than Berkshire does. The company is run by 88-year-old Buffett and his 95-year-old business partner, Charlie Munger, who is just barely the oldest member of Berkshire’s aging board of directors. And though there are successors waiting in the wings, they simply won’t have the same prestige or credibility with shareholders. Even when one of the company’s other investment managers purchased a more than US$800mil stake in Amazon.com Inc earlier this year, investors wanted to hear about it from Buffett himself.