54 years later, Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway crosses $250,000 a share

While the rest of the market awaits a big milestone, Warren Buffett just passed one of his own.
A-class shares of the Nebraska billionaire's Berkshire Hathaway briefly passed $250,000 in morning trade Tuesday, a landmark eclipsed 54 years and a day after Buffett bought his first Berkshire shares and began the march toward turning the company into a giant.

The move comes in an overall strong year for the stock, which has surged since the Nov. 8 election. Shares peaked at $250,419.50. Buffett bought his first shares at $7.50, which would be $60.03 in 2016 dollars. He acquired more than half ownership by 1965.

For the year, the company's stock is up about 26.2 percent, part of a rally that has the Dow Jones industrial average knocking on the door of 20,000.

Buffett has refused to split the A shares on the belief that he wants only serious investors involved with the company.
"I don't want anybody buying Berkshire thinking that they can make a lot of money fast," Buffett told biographer Alice Schroeder in the book "The Snowball."


Retail investors without such deep pockets can invest in Berkshire through the company's B-class shares, which carry correspondingly lower voting power. They are priced never to exceed 1/1,500th of the company's value. Those shares were trading around $166 but have had no less stellar a year, rising about 26 percent as well.

Buffett, who began buying Berkshire shares in late 1962, holds 18 percent of the class A-shares, with a market value at just shy of $73 billion as of the end of Monday trading.