berkshirehathaway.com

» go to berkshirehathaway.com now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

berkshirehathaway.com is the official home page of Berkshire Hathaway, the omaha company warren buffett spent sixty years building into a trillion dollar conglomerate. the page is a centered column of blue links in times new roman on white. no stylesheet, no favicon, font tags in the source, one tiny geico logo as the only real image. the earliest archive capture is from may 1997 and the page has not meaningfully changed since, so 1997 is the founding date anyone can actually prove.

it is not abandoned. the content updates constantly. annual reports, news releases, sec filings, annual meeting details. when i checked in august 2026 the reports page had been updated days earlier. the design just never moves.

~ the design, such as it is ~

the whole site is a list. buffett's shareholder letters going back decades, charlie munger's wesco letters, links to the operating companies, common stock information, a warning about scammers faking buffett endorsements. the biggest redesign in the site's history happened in 1999, when the single column of links became two columns. that was it. that was the redesign.

my favorite part is the bottom of the page. a geico ad, in all caps, offering a free car insurance rate quote that could save you substantial money. under that, a note explaining that due to the limited number of personnel in the corporate office, they are unable to respond to comments about the web page. a trillion dollar company, and the web team is functionally zero people.

~ why it never changed ~

buffett famously does not use email and does not care what designers think. the site reflects the company. no marketing layer, no investor relations theater, just the documents, and every one of them loads instantly on anything, including an old phone on a bad connection. shareholders can reach fifty years of letters in two clicks.

every couple of years the page does a lap on hacker news and design blogs. half the commenters offer to fix it. the other half correctly point out there is nothing to fix. i am in the second camp, and i say that as someone who has rebuilt his own sites more times than berkshire has in thirty years.

~ what could still kill it ~

buffett stepped down as ceo at the end of 2025 and greg abel took over. in 2026 the wall street journal ran a piece asking whether new management would modernize the site, and the shareholder reaction was immediate. one investor said that if greg abel decides to update the berkshire hathaway website, he will sell his shares.

so far the succession shows up only as content. abel's letters now sit on the page, in the same times new roman, one list item below buffett's. someone did slip a google analytics tag into the source at some point, which is the single concession to the modern web i could find. everything else is exactly where it was.

~ why it still matters ~

this page is proof that a website can just be a page. it serves documents to people who want documents. it has done that for almost thirty years without a redesign, an app, a newsletter popup, or a chatbot. it survived the browser wars, the flash era, the mobile pivot, and the ai wave by ignoring all of them.

it will probably outlive every site the design press praises this year, for the same reason berkshire outlives its competitors. boring, done consistently for decades, wins. the site is the investment philosophy, rendered in html 3.2.

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