Finance History | Johns Manville Plaza, Denver, 27 February 2001 — US$1.8 Billion Bought a Reorganized Materials Company

On 27 February 2001, Berkshire Hathaway acquired all outstanding shares of Johns Manville Corporation for US$13 per share, a total purchase price of approximately US$1.8 billion in 2001 dollars. The company manufactured insulation, roofing materials, engineered products and filtration media used in residential, commercial and industrial markets. Those products tied revenue to construction, renovation and industrial demand, while manufacturing scale, distribution and technical specifications influenced whether customers treated a product line as interchangeable or difficult to replace. The acquisition also carried an unusual corporate history because the predecessor Johns-Manville had been a major producer of asbestos-containing insulation and filed for Chapter 11 protection on 26 August 1982 amid present and future personal-injury claims. A bankruptcy court confirmed a reorganization plan in December 1986 that created the Manville Trust and channeled existing and future asbestos claims to it, and the relevant orders became final after appeals in 1988. That structure became the model for the asbestos channeling-trust framework later incorporated into federal bankruptcy law, allowing an operating company to continue while a dedicated trust handled covered claims under court supervision. Berkshire therefore purchased a reorganized building-products company rather than the pre-bankruptcy enterprise in its original legal form, but the trust architecture and court orders remained essential to understanding the business's financial history. The US$1.8 billion price in 2001 dollars exchanged liquid Berkshire capital for factories, brands, distribution relationships and future operating cash flows, with results still exposed to housing cycles, raw-material costs, energy prices and product-liability controls. Ownership under Berkshire offered a permanent capital base, yet it did not turn historical liabilities into an economic footnote or guarantee that every future legal question would be simple. Johns Manville Plaza at 717 17th Street anchors the acquisition to the Denver headquarters of the reorganized manufacturer, marking the point where a business shaped by one of America's most consequential mass-tort bankruptcies entered Berkshire's decentralized operating group. Photo: Jeffrey Beall, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.