Warren Buffett’s failure to capitalize on the economy’s digital shift over the last two decades has hurt his otherwise enviable track record as an investor. His blind spot regarding tech didn’t stop at the stock market: It bled into how he ran Berkshire Hathaway’s operating companies as well. Across many of his wholly owned businesses, Buffett neglected technological upgrades, and Berkshire’s business value has suffered as a result.
It’s important to understand this because the majority of Berkshire Hathaway’s assets are invested not in publicly traded securities, but in operating subsidiaries like Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and Geico. While it’s true that Buffett invested aggressively in wind energy, that was largely because of government tax incentives. In the main, he preferred to milk his operating subsidiaries for cash rather than reinvest in them for the digital age. Exhibit A is Geico, which thanks to a lack of IT investment has fallen behind Progressive as the nation’s leading for-profit auto insurer.
Buffett has called Geico his favorite child, and for good reason. Since it began in the 1930s, the auto insurer has used a direct-sales model to keep operating costs the lowest in the industry. In a commodity business like insurance, that’s a major competitive advantage. In the 1990s, after he bought all of Geico, Buffett found a second moat when he began to brand Geico as a trusted, even beloved American company. The gecko, the caveman, the camel who celebrated hump day—all these were marketing masterstrokes, ones directly derived from Buffett’s deep understanding of the mass brand-mass media industrial complex. The mascots also highlight how, while Buffett was comfortable investing in marketing, he was deeply uncomfortable with, and therefore didn’t understand, investing in tech.
When Buffett took control of Geico in 1996, he octupled its marketing budget. This wiped out almost all of Geico’s profits from a GAAP accounting standpoint, but Buffett was confident that increasing advertising outlays today would lead to more profitable customers tomorrow. And so it was: Under Buffett’s leadership, Geico’s market share grew from under 3% in 1996 to 12% in 2020, and it went from the No. 7 auto insurer to the #2 auto insurer, behind only State Farm.
So far, so good—but while Geico was investing in marketing, its rival Progressive was investing in technology. Founded only a year after Geico, Progressive began to upgrade its IT systems as early as the late 1970s. In the 1980s, it bought its agents computers and sent them floppy discs so they could better match price with risk. In 1996, Progressive became the first auto insurer to allow consumers to buy insurance online, and it continually streamlined its backend systems so that it could accurately quote new business. Today, Progressive brags that it has tens of billions of price points and that its tech stack allows the company to adjust its rates much faster than its competition—nearly once every business day. “We are a tech company that happens to sell insurance,” is one of Progressive’s internal mantras.
Driving the company’s tech investment was an insight that was perhaps even more astute than Buffett’s marketing insight. Thanks to its no-agent, no-commission model, Geico enjoyed a six-percentage-point cost advantage vs. Progressive in its operating costs. Because half of its business is through insurance agents, Progressive is unlikely ever to catch up here. But Progressive CEO Peter Lewis, who led the company from 1965 to 2000, understood that an auto insurer’s biggest cost center is the claims it must pay policyholders—four to five times bigger, in fact, than its administrative and advertising costs. If Progressive could manage these “loss costs” better than the competition, Lewis reasoned, then it could become the de facto low-cost auto insurer.
The key to managing loss costs was technology in all its glorious variety. Back-end systems at headquarters that could parse price and risk for each driver were important, but so were front line innovations like Snapshot, a shoebox-sized device that in the 1990s Progressive began installing into the cars of willing customers. Snapshot, now an app on your mobile phone, tracks a customer’s driving behavior; more than one in three Progressive customers buying insurance directly from the company opts in for “usage-based” premiums. Thanks to Snapshot and other innovations, Progressive simply knows more about its drivers than any other insurer, and this creates a virtuous circle in which the company knows which to reward with discounts, which to punish with surcharges, and which to purge altogether.
Thus, while Progressive’s operating costs have historically been six points worse than Geico, its loss costs have been 11 points better, which means that Geico’s low-cost moat has been breached by tech. In contrast to Progressive’s streamlined system, Geico has more than 600 legacy IT systems. It didn’t start working on a Snapshot-like product until 2019, twenty years after Progressive began.
Buffett liked to say that when the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked, and COVID was the perfect storm to reveal how little Geico had paid attention to its digital wardrobe. During COVID, people suddenly stopped driving, and then, when the pandemic ended, they drove more than ever and more recklessly than ever. At the same time, the worst inflation in forty years hit all sectors of the economy, including auto-repair shops. Such rapidly changing conditions favored insurers with robust tracking tools, like Progressive, and punished insurers without them, like Geico. Since 2020, Progressive has almost doubled its personal auto policy count—but Geico has lost nearly 15% of its personal insurance base. Progressive, not Geico, is now the nation’s number two auto insurer.
It turns out that while the branding of the gecko was important, it wasn’t nearly as powerful as employing sophisticated digital tools. Geico is a good example of what happens when a company, even a powerful one, fails to reinvest in its future. Rather than a virtuous cycle—tech investment leading to better pricing and better products, which drives more profits, which can then be reinvested to drive the cycle on—Geico seems caught in the same vicious cycle that afflicts General Motors, Macy’s and other legacy companies.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
