Look at the list of the 10 most valuable companies traded on U.S. stock exchanges, and something immediately jumps out. Nine of the companies comprise the business world’s coolest and most exclusive club, glamorous tech firms led by Apple (No. 1) and Nvidia (No. 2), along with Microsoft, Alphabet, and more. And then—there’s Berkshire Hathaway. As they used to sing on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the others. It’s like seeing a typewriter company on a list of hot IPOs. Who let Berkshire get past the velvet rope? It owns a company called Acme Brick, for heaven’s sake. Its website appears not to have changed materially since about 1998. Its CEO is 94 years old. But its market cap sneaked above $1 trillion a few months ago without anyone noticing, and now it sits just beneath Tesla and above Taiwan Semiconductor.
So what gives? The deeper we delve into the bizarre Berkshire anomaly, the more remarkable it seems and the more valuable the explanations become. The company is literally in a class of its own. It isn’t a tech company, but its market cap beats those of all other non-tech companies by such a vast margin that it doesn’t seem to be one of them, either; its runner-up in that group, Walmart, would have to get 41% more valuable just to match Berkshire’s market cap.
