Finance History|Kiewit Plaza, Omaha — Six Partnerships Under One Midwestern Roof

People treat Berkshire Hathaway as a Wall Street institution that happens to file from Nebraska. The holding company sits in a 15-story mid-century slab on Farnam Street. Peter Kiewit Sons developed the building as Kiewit Plaza between 1960 and 1961, across from the Blackstone Hotel. Warren Buffett's Buffett Partnership Limited had been buying Berkshire Hathaway, a Massachusetts textile combination, since 1962. The partnerships were consolidated in this building that same year. Buffett took working control of Berkshire in 1965. The textile mills were not the point for long. Insurance float, then wholly owned operating companies, filled the balance sheet while the office stayed on the upper floors of someone else's construction headquarters. Kiewit later left for a new campus. The tower was sold in 2019 and renamed Blackstone Plaza after the neighborhood, not the New York private-equity firm. Berkshire Hathaway is still listed here: 3555 Farnam Street, Omaha, an S&P 500 name whose Class A and Class B shares both sit in the index. The public sees a painted slab and a street-level entrance. There is no trading floor and no marble hall. The mechanism that matters is the one that began in 1962: a set of private partnerships folded into a public textile company, then run from a rented floor in a contractor's building a long way from Wall Street. Photo: JonClee86, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.