Berkshire Hathaway listed in 1988!?

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 merged in too, creating Berkshire Hathaway.

It took another seven years, 1962, before the company caught the eye of Warren Buffett, who purchased his first shares for just over $7 each. Two years later, the company offered to buy Buffett’s shares for $11 3⁄8. Buffett claims that was less than the verbally agreed $11 1⁄2 per share and thus rather than selling, he purchased the majority of the company.

Those shares today (November 2023) are worth $531,288, down a bit since last month when I made this graph:

But this post isn’t about that incredible growth, nor how much that is when compounded over the past 60 years. No, this post is about the very odd fact that from 1929 until 1988, this was a public company but not listed on a stock market. Maybe that was common before the 1929 crash and its long recovery, but that wasn’t the norm in 1988 and far from the norm today.

To the right is the very small story from November 30, 1988 in The New York Times, announcing that this Omaha holding company run by a billionaire takeover specialist was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for $4,750 per share.

Which, of course, opens the question, was Berkshire Hathaway just traded over the counter before 1998? Or was there some other mechanism for companies older than the SEC, that is lost to time?

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...

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 the history of Berkshire Hathaway, the more it looks like Warren Buffett’s strategy is opportunism vs. innovation. For example, the reason Buffett operates one holding company instead of three was a run in with the SEC, as I explained in an earlier post. The reason he runs Berkshire Hathway instead of just owning it through Buffett Partnerships LLC is an even earlier...