Omaha
Railroad terminus became stockyard capital, then Berkshire Hathaway's $1T home. Only 27 HQ employees allocate more capital than most cities produce.
Omaha exists because a railroad had to start somewhere. When Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act in 1862, he designated this Missouri River crossing as the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad. The Omaha Tribe had sold four million acres for less than 22 cents each just eight years earlier. Now that land would anchor the infrastructure that connected two oceans. Union Pacific has been headquartered here ever since.
The railroad brought stockyards. By the 1880s, every major railroad in America served Omaha. By 1955, the city had surpassed Chicago as the world's largest livestock processing center—half the workforce employed in meatpacking. The pattern repeated: railroads concentrate traffic, traffic concentrates processing, processing concentrates employment.
Then Warren Buffett happened. The native son built Berkshire Hathaway into a $1 trillion conglomerate from an office with just 27 employees—the most economically leveraged headquarters in corporate history. Berkshire ranks #12 on the Fortune 500, allocating capital across insurance, railroads (including BNSF), energy, and manufacturing. In 2025, Buffett announced his retirement as CEO; Greg Abel succeeds him January 1, 2026. The company holds $344 billion in Treasury bills plus $44 billion cash—the largest cash position of any U.S. public company.
Omaha now ranks eighth among America's 50 largest cities for per-capita billionaires and Fortune 500 companies. Four Fortune 500 headquarters cluster here: Berkshire Hathaway, Union Pacific (#151), Peter Kiewit and Sons (#446), and Mutual of Omaha (#489). Six national fiber optic networks converge downtown—the 'telecommunications capital' processing data like it once processed cattle.
By 2026, Omaha demonstrates that physical infrastructure creates institutional infrastructure. The railroads that converged here attracted capital allocators. The stockyards that processed animals trained workers to process information. Small headquarters, massive reach—Omaha is a keystone hub, its influence wildly disproportionate to its size.