$700,000 per share and $1 Trillion of value

The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion.

Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the world. Six of the other seven are the Big Tech: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, plus the newest addition, Nvidia. The only other is Aramco, the government owned oil company of Saudi Arabia.

I’m a big fan of Buffett. This year I made the pilgrimage to Omaha for the Shareholder Gathering. And on top of that, my latest book explains how Berkshire Hathaway works and how the learnings from that 60+ year success story can be used to end hunger and poverty in Africa.

If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...

Why did New York need another stock exchange in 1968? Why was the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, and Pacific Stock Exchange insufficient? An unprecedented bull market coupled with paper-based systems. I’m in my 50’s and don’t remember “Wall Street” not having both the NYSE and NASDAQ as the two main exchanges. I am old enough to remember the AMEX...

I always through the company name Intel was a just the first five letter of “intellegent” or “intellegence”. Wrong. It’s a portmanteau of INTegrated ELectronics. This was one of the many tidbits of knowledge that have shown up in The Snowball, the “other” biography of Warren Buffett. Turns out Warren had the opportunity to invest $100,000 into the initial...

The more I dig into Berkshire Hathaway, the odder it gets. Did you know the company wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange until November 1988? In 1929, Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates was created through the merger of the Berkshire Cotton Manufacturing Company (founded in 1889) with Oliver Chace’s textile companies (founded in 1839). In 1955, Hathaway Manufacturing Company...

It’s quite rare when the U.S. media has something nice to say about Africa. This week was an exception, in The New York Times, in an interactive digital article about the population growth and economic growth of the African continent. The median age in Africa here in 2023 is just 19 years old, nearly a decade younger than in India and the rest of South Asia. By 2050, more than 1/3rd of all...

$700,000 per share and $1 Trillion of value

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