Buffet has been "flipping heads" consecutively for several decades, with no regression to the mean.
And even more recently he did the cool thing of being a top or the top shareholder of the big 3-4 airline companies in America: United, Delta, American, Southwest.
There have also been some pretty big complete buy outs this century. Two come to mine. One being some manufacturing company. Another being a rail company. Both buyouts were in the low tens of billions. And then Gen Re insurance as mentioned above was no small thing either.
There are many articles on this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-...
There are of course many risks to their business model, e.g. high fixed costs, competition, regulatory risk, technical malfunctions, etc.
They are "lucky" to be in a position to capitalize on the opportunity, but investment luck does not play a role on a day to day basis.
If you've seen a system like this in action, it's a beautiful thing to behold and cannot be mere luck. Transactions stream in constantly. It's not just one big, lucky bet, but thousands of tiny bets with a slight edge. A plot of profit & loss with respect to time looks like an almost perfectly smooth upward line. And if you're good, you can do this every single day for years and years.
Still, I wouldn't say guys like that have beaten the market in a real way. I've certainly never felt like I did. This style of trading doesn't need outside capital and can't scale. If I gave you $100 and armed you with a scalping bot, I bet you could easily turn it into $200 buying hot tickets on Ticketmaster and reselling them. But would anyone call you a genius trader? Could you do it with a million? A billion?
As a business net of all costs like employee compensation and technology, returns to owners are pretty lousy. Compare owning Virtu stock to an index fund since their IPO. Ouch.