In effect, Mr. Buffett is arguing that he and the vice chairman, Charlie Munger, and their 25-person team in Omaha are better at deciding the appropriate allocation of capital among different potential investments than the entire infrastructure of the modern financial system — banks, stock and bond markets, buyout funds and so on — that are supposed to do just that.

The key advantages that Berkshire may have, in other words, are that the company decides how to allocate capital with neither the self-interested decision-making of many operating executives (most people don’t want to dismantle the company they lead, after all, even if its business prospects have collapsed), nor the high fees and short-term perspective of private equity and other buyout artists.

If you believe Mr. Buffett, Berkshire is able to achieve the analytical rigor of the latter mixed with the long-term perspective of the former.

But there’s a bit more to his success than just being really good at capital allocation. There are surely thousands of people who can match Mr. Buffett’s talent for evaluating the prospects of a business and deciding which should get more investment and which less. But most of them won’t end up with a $72 billion net worth and 340,000 employees.

Mr. Buffett acknowledges a second reason for his company’s success: “We are now the home of choice for the owners and managers of many outstanding businesses.” In other words, if you are a family looking to cash out of a business but want to leave the company intact and keep longtime employees in place to run it, selling to Berkshire Hathaway looks mighty attractive. But there’s a good chance you’re going to have to accept less money than a private equity firm or a strategic acquirer would offer.

The unique art of Mr. Buffett and Berkshire, as Matt Levine writes at Bloomberg View, is in the ability to “be rigorous while seeming sentimental, to drive a hard bargain by looking like a teddy bear.” In effect, he is able to get favorable deals on his acquisition because of a reputation built over a lifetime for buying good companies and more or less leaving them alone.

That’s the giant question for the future of this enormous company. To the degree that this new-style conglomerate has succeeded because it has found a better way to allocate capital than the one the rest of the world uses, it should have a long and bright future under its next chief executive, thought to be either Ajit Jain or Greg Abel.

However, if you want to chalk up Berkshire’s success to its ability to persuade sellers of businesses to accept less than a market value for some of the Buffett Mystique, the new leadership, whenever it takes charge, will face a steep challenge in building the same sort of reputation.