Bloomberg — Warren Buffett’s “Woodstock for Capitalists” will finally meet in person again -- for the first time in three years.
His Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s (BRK/A) annual meeting, which normally draws thousands to his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, is currently being planned for an in-person event on April 30, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The event, which will also still be webcast, will be held at Omaha’s CHI Health Center arena, Buffett’s assistant said in an email.
“At this time, we are planning for an in-person meeting,” Berkshire said.
Berkshire, like many companies around the world, switched to a virtual meeting in 2020 as the pandemic bore down across the U.S. and kept it in a virtual format last year as well. During his announcement that the 2021 meeting would be virtual, Buffett said he hoped it’d be the last time that investors couldn’t attend his “Woodstock for Capitalists” event in person.
Shareholders normally flock to Omaha to watch Buffett, 91, and his business partner Charlie Munger, 98, sit on a stage for hours to entertain shareholder questions on topics ranging from investment decisions to life lessons. In 2020, Buffett and Greg Abel, a Berkshire vice chairman, were the only two executives fielding questions given their proximity to Omaha. The next year, Buffett joined Munger on stage closer to Munger’s home in Los Angeles.
The annual meeting is a big affair for Omaha. Even after Berkshire started streaming the event virtually alongside the in-person meeting, the company’s businesses, which set up sales booths in the venue, and Omaha’s hotels and restaurants “racked up huge sales,” Buffett said in his 2017 letter. Flight prices were already starting to tick up Tuesday, with a non-stop one-way flight from New York to Omaha the day before the annual meeting costing at least $260 versus about $149 a week earlier, according to Google’s flight-scheduling service.
Buffett’s company also disclosed that his much-anticipated annual letter will be posted on February 26. That report should detail more about the meeting, the company said.
Read more:
