Who Owns Kiewit?

Peter and Andrew Kiewit founded Kiewit Brothers in Omaha in 1884, laying brick on small local buildings. Peter took control in the early 1900s and moved into heavy civil work, and by the 1920s the company had built Nebraska landmarks including the State Capitol Tower, Joslyn Art Museum, and Union Station.

Postwar decades made it a national contractor: Thule Air Base in Greenland through the 1950s and 60s, New York's 63rd Street Tunnel starting in 1969, the Fort McHenry Tunnel under Baltimore Harbor in the early 1980s. Walter Scott Jr. became CEO in 1979, expanded aggressively, and built the famous Buffett connection: Scott was Warren Buffett's close friend, a major Berkshire shareholder, and a board member, giving Kiewit a reputation as construction's most disciplined capital allocator.

The 1998 spin-off of Level 3 Communications, which took its fiber-optic venture public, remains a landmark corporate separation. Recent signature projects include the Oroville Dam spillway emergency rebuild, the Klamath River dam removals (the largest in US history), the Washington Metro Silver Line Phase II, and the Francis Scott Key Bridge reconstruction underway in Baltimore.