The purchase price of 41.4% stake could be revealed in Berkshire’s 2022 10-K—in a section on corporate events after year end—or in Buffett’s annual shareholder letter. Both are due for release on Saturday, Feb. 25. The second installment could come at a price that is more than double the original one based on Pilot’s growth since 2017.
Pilot Flying J, now known as Pilot Co., runs more than 750 of what it calls travel centers around the country as well as a growing energy business. Pilot owns a fleet of tanker trucks, a natural-gas liquids business and it has a partnership with
General Motors GM +0.88% (GM) to install 2,000 charging stations for electric vehicles at its truck stops. Pilot also is investing $1 billion to upgrade its truck stops.
Berkshire releases little financial information about Pilot. The company had sales of $45 billion in 2021, up from about $20 billion in 2017. Pilot is the country’s fifth largest private company ranked by revenue in 2022, Forbes has estimated.
Buffett wrote enthusiastically in his 2017 annual letter about the company and followed that up with a comment in the 2020 letter that Pilot’s pretax earnings topped $1 billion.
“‘Big Jim’ Haslam started what became Pilot Travel Centers in 1958 by purchasing a service station for $6,000,”
Buffett wrote. Haslam then “brought into the business a son with the same passion, values and brains as his father. Sometimes there is a magic to genes.” Both the elder Haslam and Buffett are 92.The son, Jimmy Haslam, has since ceded the CEO role to Shameek Konar, an energy expert who came on as chief strategy officer in 2017 and led Pilot’s expansion in the energy area. Haslam remains chairman. Konar had been co-head of
Goldman Sachs GS –0.67% ‘ principal investments in commodities from 2009 to 2012.
Berkshire has offered some clues to what it may pay for the 41.4% stake. In its 2021 10-K, it said: “If we had acquired the additional interest in Pilot and all outstanding noncontrolling interests as of Dec. 31, 2021, we estimate the aggregate cost of these acquisitions would approximate $11 billion.” This refers to Pilot and to such other Berkshire businesses like Electric Transmission of Texas.
Berkshire may soon reveal what it paid for the second installment of its purchase of Pilot Co.
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