Berkshire Billionaire Found With More Shares Than Gates

Stewart Horejsi’s business was in a funk. It was 1980, and Brown Welding Supply LLC, his family’s third-generation distributor of hydrogen and oxygen tanks, was battling competitors that were intent on expanding into the corner of Kansas he controlled.

“It was a profitable business, but companies took their money and bought more trucks,” Horejsi, 75, said in a telephone interview from his home in Paradise Valley, Arizona. “The competition just grew.”