CentralPacific wrote:Since berkshire hathaway, in which warren buffet is the ceo of berkshire, who is technically in charge of the railroad berkshire hathaway or matt rose(current bnsf president & ceo), also what will this mean for bnsf, will they attract new customers, rebuild more trackage and yards, and possibly build new yards, what?
I'll explain how it works at my company which is another Berkshire Hathaway company.
Warren Buffett prefers a hands-off approach, he likes buying businesses that are ALREADY well-run and provide solid, if not necessary huge, returns. He does not want to run individual companies.
When BRK buys a company (either directly or through a subsidiary company, which is how my company was acquired) usually the company's leadership team remains intact or with only few changes. So Matt Rose is still President of BNSF/Burlington Northern Santa Fe (or according to all of the news stories, "Burlington"). The Chairman of the Board and the Board of Directors is replaced out of nature, the Board (if one still exists) is basically Berkshire's hand picked employees, or Berkshire's own Board.
In my company: I work for two different subsidiaries of a company, itself a subsidiary of another company, which is then owned about 88% by Berkshire. So my direct company has three Presidents, one for each of the component subsidiaries (two are based on geography, and the other by its function.) My company has a Chairman, who happens to be the President by the holding company which owns my company along with several other subsidiaries worldwide. That company has a Chairman who then reports to Berkshire.
Berkshire itself is a very, very small company with just a handful of employees; in a day-to-day basis we have little involvement with Berkshire and as a low level employee there is really only one thing I receive that comes to me directly from Berkshire, having to do with corporate ethics violations reporting (which is common to all Berkshire companies, and so BNSF employees will be getting that information as well.) I do receive a weekly newsletter from my direct holding company that includes safety statistics and high level business information with our other component companies, and occassionally will get special news articles. But the majority of my communications are within my direct company.
If you want more details (i.e. names), contact me via PM and I can be more detailed.
