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At Barron's

Is this Company a 'Little Berkshire Hathaway'? Its CEO Weighs In.

At Barron's

At Barron's

Business

4.717 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Tom Gayner, CEO of Markel Group, spoke about how the holding company has studied Berkshire Hathaway's playbook, Markel's stock performance, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:26.8

Hello everyone and welcome to At Barrens.

0:29.0

I'm Andy Serwer and welcome to our guest Tom Gainer, CEO of Markell Group.

0:34.3

Tom, great to see you.

0:35.2

Thanks for joining us.

0:36.5

Andy, thanks so much for happening. Good to be here. I know this is a question you often get,

0:40.8

but please explain to us what Markell Group is exactly. Well, Markell Group is an insurance-based

0:47.0

holding company. Been around since 1930, so we're coming up on 100 years. We started out in

0:53.1

Northfoot, Virginia, ensuring Jitney

0:56.2

transportation devices and taxi cabs of its day and kept in sort of specialty forms of insurance

1:03.7

for a long time. We've been investors in public equity securities for a very long time and

1:09.9

started about 20 years ago. We moved from

1:12.3

buying publicly traded securities to buying wholly owned businesses. We have a collection of insurance

1:18.1

and investment and non-insurance businesses that comprise the Markell group.

1:23.3

All right. Well, a lot of people might say that sounds a little bit like Berkshire Hathaway.

1:27.4

You get that a lot, but you're a little Berkshire Hathaway.

1:31.0

Is that the case, Tom, and how intentional is that?

1:34.7

Well, we've certainly studied the playbook and the example of what Buffett built at Berkshire for many, many years.

...

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