Happy Birthday, Warren!
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*Miles* of $100 bills
While purely coincidental, it’s fun to see Berkshire in the news for hitting $1 trillion in market cap right around Warren Buffett’s 94th birthday.
A friend did the math and found that if you were to create a stack of $100 bills worth $1 trillion it would be 678 miles high. That’s higher than the International Space Station orbits the Earth!
Here’s Chat GPT’s attempt to visualize it (Somehow the money is coming up from the Earth’s surface AND going out from space; AI is amazing but also pretty funny at times.)
Incredible Compounding
As I wrote on X, Berkshire's market cap averaged about $20 million in 1965 (WB started buying at under $10 million). Buffett has presided over a 50,000x increase in Berkshire's market value. Here's the most incredible part: Outstanding shares have gone from about 1.08 million in 1965 to 1.4 million today, an increase of 1.3x. In other words, the VAST majority of wealth creation has accrued to the *shareholders* of Berkshire Hathaway.
$1,000,000 Per Share or Bust!
I think $1 million per Class A share is the next major milestone. It’s not as far off as one might think. With 1.4 million shares outstanding that’s a $1.4 trillion market cap. I could see that happening within the next two or three years, perhaps five at the latest. News organizations had trouble when shares hit the $100,000 mark as the 6th digit caused issues keeping it within the narrow columns. What will an extra zero and an extra comma do?!
Gratitude
There are many other things to say about Berkshire's financial accomplishments — the dollars and cents. What I’ve come to cherish most about Buffett, Munger, and Berkshire are the life lessons. I’m so much better a person because these men existed.
Too many lay observers (and the press) can’t get past the Forbes 400 rankings to fully appreciate Buffett’s lifetime of demonstrating how to be a good human: Loving what you do, generously teaching the next generation, taking the high road, operating with a fiduciary responsibility to those who trust and rely on you, thinking about how society treats all its members, and using the “claim checks” (dollars) we earn for good, all of this and more are values lived by Warren Buffett.
Warren once joked that Charlie, 7 years his senior, was the canary in the coal mine. While I sure hope we have 6 more years to spend with Warren, we can’t be sure when he’ll leave us. We should cherish every day this incredible human lives among us.
Stay rational! —Adam
Amen, Beautifully said! Long live the King!!!