Liam Denning, Columnist

Buffett Made Occidental the Kind of Company He Can Love

He showed up with $10 billion at a critical moment, and now clearly expects oil and gas prices to remain healthy enough to support his investment.

August 16, 2022 at 1:50 PM UTC

By Liam Denning

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

He gets to create the reality he prefers.
Photographer: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

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One of the benefits of being Warren Buffett is that you make things happen just by showing up. If he so much as gestures at a stock, it is liable to pop immediately, providing a nice self-fulfilling gain. When it comes to Occidental Petroleum Corp., the Buffett effect runs far deeper than that, and yet it is less pronounced — which says a lot about the US oil sector in 2022.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s latest quarterly holdings filing, which dropped late Monday, showed a 17% stake in Oxy, as it is known, as of June. In reality, other filings put the stake above 20% now. In any case, Buffett’s company is Oxy’s largest shareholder by far. As recently as last December, Berkshire owned none of the company’s common stock. That doesn’t mean Buffett wasn’t a presence though. Far from it.