Sears Holding is run by Eddie Lampert, who is certainly, for a young man, a dramatically successful investor -- his ESL Investments hedge fund is generally admired for tremendous returns, and he certainly does follow some of the same contrarian investing principles as Buffett, though he has tended to be an activist investor rather than a buyer of entire companies. Lampert would need to focus on either ESL or Sears Holdings as his investment vehicle -- his hedge fund already has big investors like Michael Dell and David Geffen, and while SHLD probably makes up at least 2/3 of ESL Investments' holdings, it's not as if the two are the same. Buffett ended up having to drop his Buffett Partners investment vehicle to focus on Berkshire -- will Lampert do the same, or does he need to?

Markel (MKL) seems to be following a very similar tack to Berkshire Hathaway -- albeit skipping the first few steps of buying the failing textile mill, etc., and instead moving straight into the lucrative insurance business. One of the things that stands out, aside from the great performance from their insurance lines during this nice rebound year for the insurers, is that management really SOUNDS like Warren Buffett in their corporate releases. And with their investment in the local First Market Bank in their local VA stomping grounds, there's some speculation that they're starting to spread their wings, investment-wise, and begin investing some of their prodigious cash flow outside the stock market (even as Thomas Gayner, who runs the investments for Markel, focuses on a lot of the same conservative, boring criteria as Buffett has in making hugely successful stock investment decisions).

White Mountains Insurance (WTM) comes up with some regularity, not least because Buffett has owned shares for ages. Another insurance conglomerate, with a strong investment portfolio but without the Berkshire focus on buying operating companies in other industries, White Mountains may be a great investment -- and certainly an underlooked one, with shares trading well above $500 according to the Buffett anti-split preferences. But with the aging insurance legend Jack Byrne at the helm this feels more like a current Berkshire Hathaway Junior than a company that's likely to take it to the next level in the coming decades.

Leucadia (LUK) wins for having the most Berkshire-like website (just compare http://www.leucadia.com to http://www.berkshirehathaway.com). It's a relatively small company for all the investments and properties they own, and there seems to be a significant "conglomerate discount" built into these shares to compensate for the fact that anyone buying LUK shares has to understand operations as diverse as wineries, timber, telecom, and manufacturing. Leucadia started as a financial company, but is no longer significantly exposed to insurance or banking as far as we can tell -- this is certainly an intriguing company for further research.

The former Brascan, now Brookfield Asset Management (BAM), has been hugely successful both in managing money for institutions and in building up a collection of hard assets in, among other areas, real estate, timber, and power generation, and may be able to use the recent Canadian Trust tax law changes to buy up some valuable trust assets on the cheap, not unlike Buffett's investment in MidAmerican Energy back when pipelines seemed boring ... but while the conglomerate is growing and one could be intrigued by the opportunity ahead for this company to potentially build itself into the Macquarie of North America, there's no hint of the kind of quiet under-the-radar wealth building that early Berkshire investors enjoyed.

The Rales brothers who built Danaher (DHR) could be the next Berkshire or Buffett but given their extremely hands-on management style and focus on manufacturing this is really more like GE Junior than Berkshire Junior.

Prem Watsa (at one time known as the "Canadian Warren Buffett") runs Fairfax Financial (FFH). However, Prem Watsa seems to be too much of a lightning rod at this point -- seems to be a lot of legal risk at his company. Although he has shown some promise in building an insurance holding company in Canada (and the shares may have more volatility than any other pretender to the Berkshire throne, which some folks like).