Good morning, everyone. Welcome to a special edition of squawk box here on cnbc. Im becky quick and this morning i am in a suburb of omaha ham, nebraska, called la vista. Joe kernen is back at cnbc headquarters on the east coast. Our special guest this morning is Berkshire Hathaways Warren Buffett. Weve been soliciting your questions for mr. Bust over the last several days and as always, he he didnt disappoint. You have emailed, tweeted, facebooked and shared your thoughts on linkedin. Before we get to that, joe is going to give us a quick rundown of the mornings top headlines. Hey, beck. I know the sequester is hitting everybody hard, but this is your new set up there with the boxes and the usually we can splurge a little bit more. This is affecting everyone, i think. This it is. But this was a purchase. Berkshire never gave any numbers on this, but it was reported that this was a purchase of about 500 million. Whoa. But it was what we twauts the companys most recent acquisition. He s
Operator
Welcome to the Atlas Corp. Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded today, March 9, 2021.
I would now like to turn the call over to Robert Weiner, Head of Investor Relations of Atlas Corp.
Robert Weiner
Head of Investor Relations
Thank you and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss Atlas Corp s fourth quarter 2020 earnings. We issued our earnings release last evening after market closed. We will refer to our quarterly earnings release, accompanying earnings presentation and supplemental documents today in this conference, which all can be found on the Investor Relations tab on our website www.atlascorporation.com.
40,000 shareholders who descend upon omaha, nebraska from countries all over the world to hear what one of the world s richest men, warren buffett has to say. what did he say? he said regarding one of his managers, the ceo of net jets, dave sokol who stepped down abruptly. his behavior involving stock trades that he later brought to warren to buy were inexcusable and inexplicable and he depends on trust and when insiders within the country know secrets what they ll buy. they should not behave or trade on this. why does it matter to the average viewer. warren buffett owns company berkshire hathaway ab underneath that umbrella he owns several companies, many of you guys participate or use, dairy queen, see s chocolate, burlington northern railroad. net jets, certainly. and fractional for you fancy
people and here at the meeting, he has sol things to sell and it s it s got warren buffett and vice chair charlie munger riding the choo-choo the burlington northern he bought for 26 billion dollars, it s a feel that you ve never seen before for anybody who owns a stock in any company they always have annual shareholder meetings to answer questions and nothing like this one. no ceo sits there for an entire day and takes, you know, unlimited questions. it s pretty amazing and a couple of things that he said. he said he s bullish on the united states and that it s capitalism that will bring this country out of the financial recession and you know, he s sure about that. the translation, it s not the government that helps to get the country back on the feet and it s private businesses and capital sichl and swatted down gold investors. why would you invest in gold? it doesn t produce anything or
sense of faith here and i think that s where they get a lot of their strength from. if you look behind me we re east of the university of alabama and it s a bit of a commercial complex here, this is a store and people going through the store to try to save whatever they can. if you come back to the right, dan. you look behind me and these are neighborhoods, completely and utterly devastated and this is not just this neighborhood here, but this goes on for miles to the east. and it goes on for miles to the west, in front of me. and the mayor held a press conference just a little while ago and we ll be talking with walter maddox in just a second and here s the numbers as they stand. he says inside the city of tuscaloosa and expanded police jurisdictional area, 39 people are known to be dead a count based on bodies that have actually come to the morgue. the alabama emergency management agency says that number is higher, it s 45. more than 5,000 structures have been affected by t