Month: June 2026

The world’s most expensive stock, and why that’s the whole point.

Here is a company that employs 400,000 people and has 25 people at its head office. A company worth over $1 trillion, whose CEO paid himself $100,000 a year for four decades. Whose headquarters rent costs $270,000 annually. That is less than what most mid-sized startups spend on office snacks. A company that has never paid a dividend. Never split its stock. Never made a hostile acquisition. And has not sold a single share of Coca-Cola in 36 years.

Its name is Berkshire Hathaway. It is a holding company, meaning it does not make one thing or sell one service. It owns other businesses, entirely or in part, across insurance, railways, energy, consumer brands, and financial markets. In practice that means it owns ice cream chains, battery brands, freight railways, car insurers, aerospace manufacturers, and some of the largest equity stakes in Apple and Coca-Cola on the planet. One share of Berkshire is, in effect, a share in all of them simultaneously.

That one share currently costs $710,900, roughly rupees 6.75 crore. It is the most expensive publicly listed stock in the world. And the fact that the price has never once been cut down to something more accessible is, as you will see, entirely intentional.

Berkshire started as a failing cotton mill in Rhode Island. It is now one of the ten most valuable companies on the planet, sitting on $369 billion in cash, all held together by one investing philosophy that is almost offensively simple.

The man who built it, Warren Buffett, just stepped down after 60 years. A new CEO walked in on January 1, 2026. And the question the entire investing world is now sitting with is: can anyone actually replicate what he did, or did the machine only ever run on him?

This edition unpacks all of it. How Berkshire works, what you actually own when you buy a share, where the money really comes from, and what the next chapter looks like. By the end, the absurdity will make complete sense. And that might be the most unsettling part.

1. The price tag that broke the internet
2. Why one share costs $710,000, on purpose
3. One share, sixty companies
4. Born from a 12-cent grudge
5. Numbers that shouldn’t be real
6. After the oracle leaves the building

Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A shares, BRK.A, trade at around $710,900 each. That makes them the most expensive publicly listed stock on earth. Not because Berkshire is worth more per share than Apple or Microsoft, but because Buffett made a decision in 1965 and never reversed it: he would not split the stock. Ever.

His reasoning was straightforward. A high share price keeps out short-term traders and day speculators. The people willing to write a $710,000 cheque for a single share are, almost by definition, thinking in decades. Buffett wanted owners, not renters.

Class A is held almost entirely by institutions, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and insiders. Buffett himself holds around 200,000 Class A shares, roughly 38% of every Class A share in existence. These shareholders vote on who leads the company, what it acquires, and where capital gets deployed. It is a share built to keep control concentrated and long-term.

Class A is held almost entirely by institutions, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and insiders. Buffett himself holds around 200,000 Class A shares, roughly 38% of every Class A share in existence. These shareholders vote on who leads the company, what it acquires, and where capital gets deployed. It is a share built to keep control concentrated and long-term.

In 1996, Buffett created a second class, BRK.B, at exactly 1/1,500th of a Class A share. Currently around $474. The economics are identical: every profit Berkshire earns, every dollar of gains on its investments, flows to Class B holders at exactly 1/1,500th the rate of a Class A holder. Not approximately. Exactly. What Class B holders give up is voting power, each B share carries 1/10,000th of an A vote. For most investors, that tradeoff is irrelevant. The money is the same.

Buffett created the B share so that regular investors could participate in the same compounding, the same discipline, the same 60-year philosophy, at a price that doesn’t require a second mortgage.

Think of Berkshire as a holding company, a container that holds other companies. When you buy a share, you’re not betting on one business. You’re buying into the entire portfolio.

Two flavours of ownership come bundled together. First, there are businesses Berkshire owns outright, GEICO (America’s second-largest auto insurer), BNSF Railway (one of the country’s biggest freight railroads), Berkshire Hathaway Energy (utilities across multiple US states), Dairy Queen, See’s Candies, Duracell, Brooks Running shoes, Benjamin Moore paint, Precision Castparts (aerospace manufacturing), and over 50 more. These aren’t investments. These are Berkshire’s companies. The profits flow directly into Berkshire’s accounts.

Second, there are equity stakes, minority positions in publicly traded companies. Apple is the biggest, at roughly 300 million shares worth around $66 billion. Then American Express (~$41B), Bank of America (~$29B), Coca-Cola (~$25B), a stake Berkshire started building in 1988 for $1.3 billion and has never sold a single share of. Forty-two stocks in total, worth about $274 billion combined.

And then there’s the vault: $369 billion in cash and US Treasury bills sitting at the end of 2025, waiting for the right moment. That’s more than the GDP of South Africa. One share of BRK.B owns a fractional slice of all of it.

Berkshire Hathaway started as a struggling New England textile mill. By the early 1960s it was bleeding money, the industry was dying, and the stock was cheap. Buffett started buying in 1962 at $7.50 a share, purely as a short-term value trade. His plan was to sell back to the owners, the Stanton family, pocket a modest profit, and move on.

The Stantons verbally agreed to buy his shares back at $11.50 each. When the written offer arrived, it read $11.375. A difference of 12.5 cents per share. Buffett’s response was to buy more shares, aggressively, until he held 49% of the company. By May 1965, he controlled Berkshire Hathaway.

He later called it the worst investment decision of his career. The textile business was beyond saving, and he spent the next 20 years throwing money at it out of stubbornness before finally closing the mills in 1985. By his own estimate, that emotional reaction to a 12-cent slight cost him roughly $200 billion in opportunity cost over the following decades.

But the corporate structure, the shell, the name, the capital base, became his vehicle for everything else. The key move came in 1967. Buffett used Berkshire’s cash to buy a small insurance company called National Indemnity for $8.6 million. Insurance gave him access to something no stock portfolio could: float. When you pay a car insurance premium in January, the insurer collects that money immediately and pays your claim whenever it happens, which might be never, or might be in three years. The pool of money held between those two points is float. It costs nothing. And it can be invested.

Berkshire’s float was $19 million in 1967. By end of 2025 it exceeded $160 billion. That entire sum has been invested, continuously, for six decades. It is the real engine of the company, not the stock picks, not the acquisitions. The float. In 1976, Buffett deployed some of that float to rescue a near-bankrupt insurer called GEICO with a $45 million investment. GEICO is now America’s second-largest auto insurer and one of Berkshire’s biggest float generators. The bet on a dying company became a pillar of the empire. The float is structurally unique to insurance. Buffett did not find a better way to invest. He found a better way to fund investing.

For 40+ years, Buffett paid himself $100,000 a year. No bonus. No stock options. No perks. The man overseeing a trillion-dollar company earned less annually than a mid-level manager at one of his subsidiaries. His wealth came entirely from Berkshire’s share price rising, which meant his financial interests were perfectly aligned with shareholders. He got rich only when they did.

The headquarters situation is equally strange. Berkshire employs around 400,000 people across its subsidiaries. The corporate office that oversees all of them has roughly 25 staff. No PR department. No corporate strategy team. No internal management consultants. Subsidiary CEOs run their own companies. Berkshire wires them capital and leaves them alone. Stanford Business School described the overhead-to-assets ratio as “almost unheard of in any business setting.”

Berkshire has never paid a dividend. Not once. Buffett’s position: if he can compound shareholder capital at 20% a year, returning cash to investors so they can reinvest it at market rates is economically wasteful. The stock price has compounded at roughly 20% annually since 1965. The S&P 500 managed 10.5% over the same period. Berkshire outperformed the market by roughly double, for six decades straight. A $1,000 investment in Berkshire in 1965 is worth approximately $36 million today. The S&P 500 turned that same $1,000 into around $100,000 over the same period. Extraordinary by any normal measure. Berkshire turned it into 360 times more.

5. After the oracle leaves the building

On January 1, 2026, Greg Abel became CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is 62, Canadian, and has worked at Berkshire for 25 years, most recently running all the non-insurance operations. Buffett, now 95, stays on as chairman. At the May 2026 annual meeting, he sat on the arena floor while Abel ran the session from the stage.

Abel’s first public test went well. When asked whether Berkshire would ever be broken up, sold off in pieces, stripped for parts, he was unambiguous: “Absolutely not.” The conglomerate structure stays. The lean headquarters stays. The subsidiary autonomy stays. He hung a jersey with Buffett’s number 60 in the rafters, for 60 years as CEO.

But Abel is making moves Buffett never made. He bought into airline stocks, a sector Buffett famously despised, once joking that investors would have been better off if someone had shot down Orville Wright’s plane at Kitty Hawk. He trimmed or closed 22 equity positions in his first quarter. He talked at length about AI, specifically exploring large language models to optimise BNSF’s railway operations and flagging data centre power demand as a growth opportunity for Berkshire’s energy division.

The market reacted cautiously to the transition. Berkshire’s stock fell around 15% when Buffett announced his retirement in 2025, then recovered most of it. As of June 2026, BRK.A trades around $710,900,not far off its all-time high of $809,350 set in May 2025.

Whether Abel can sustain what Buffett built is an open question. The businesses are exceptional. The capital allocation record is unmatched. But a significant portion of the trust investors placed in Berkshire was trust in one specific 95-year-old man in Omaha who had been right, consistently, for six decades.

The Berkshire story is, at its core, a story about patience in a world that rewards the opposite. Everyone else chases the next quarter. Buffett bought Coca-Cola in 1988 and has not sold a share in 38 years. Everyone else runs sprawling head offices full of strategists and consultants. Berkshire runs an empire from a 25-person floor in Omaha. Everyone else splits their stock the moment it gets expensive. Berkshire said no for 60 years, turned the price itself into a philosophy.

The formula, as Buffett once put it, was embarrassingly simple: find wonderful businesses, pay a fair price, then do nothing. The results, a 3,600,000% return since 1965, a $1 trillion market cap, and enough cash to buy most countries outright, suggest that “doing nothing” is actually the hardest thing in the world to do.

Disclamer- This content is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. Please consult qualified professionals before making any financial decisions. MintWit Financial Services LLP is an AMFI-registered Mutual Fund Distributor (ARN-283168); however, all investments are subject to market risks and returns are not assured.