Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK-B) (NYSE: BRK-A) succession plans may have been dealt a body blow after the abrupt resignation of potential Warren Buffett heir David Sokol.

Sokol's seemingly legal but ethically gray decision to buy 100,000 shares of Lubrizol (NYSE: LZ) ahead of suggesting it as a buyout candidate to Buffett and Charlie Munger is opening a can of worms at the historically squeaky-clean market darling.

Buffett and Munger aren't getting any younger, so investors have a right to be concerned over the small scandal with big implications. Still, as long as Buffett doesn't begin soliciting investors to mentor through Craigslist, Berkshire Hathaway should be fine.

Briefly in the news
And now let's take a quick look at some of the other stories that shaped our week.

  • Post-secondary educators took a hit after Apollo Group (Nasdaq: APOL) issued lukewarm guidance and warned of shrinking enrollment. That's the school of hard knocks in action!
  • Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) commands roughly two-thirds of the search queries in China, but it isn't perfect. The dot-com darling is closing down the e-commerce platform that it was initially hoping would be a worthy competitor to Alibaba's Taobao. The search continues.
  • It's electric! Morgan Stanley upgraded shares of electric-car maker Tesla Motors (Nasdaq: TSLA), slapping it with a $70 price target. That's an aggressive goal for shares that were trading at just a third of Morgan Stanley's target earlier this week.
  • Clean Energy Fuels (Nasdaq: CLNE) took off after a speech by President Obama encouraged the use of natural gas as a car-fueling alternative to oil. Clean Energy is building out a network of natural-gas fueling stations.

Until next week, I remain,

Rick Munarriz

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