Berkshire hathaway stock price 1985
TREASTER MAY 2, In , Bill Scargle bought his first stock in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate built by Warren E. Scargle, a career clerk in the brokerage business from Orinda, Calif. But he still has several million dollars' worth, he says, and he savors his good fortune daily. The first thing he sees when he turns on his computer is the stock price.
Scargle, 65 and retired, said as he was preparing to attend the company's 39th annual meeting here in the Qwest Center auditorium. The Berkshire meeting, the biggest annual shareholders meeting in the country, and surely one of the most festive, is filled this year as most with early investors like Mr.
They are rich or richer because of their Berkshire investments, and they focus their gratitude on the founder, chairman and main engine of the company, Mr.
TMF: Berkshire price history since / Berkshire Hathaway
Buffett, a lifelong Nebraskan who has cultivated a folksy, down-home style while making a personal fortune in the tens of billions. To longtime investors, Mr. Buffett is the Dalai Lama, the pope, Will Rogers and Midas rolled into one.
And he has done this for hundreds and hundreds of people. Buffett, 73, ambled through a thicket of blue blazers and silk dresses at a reception at Borsheim's Jewelry, chatting and posing for snapshots with investors.
He opened the meeting on Saturday with an hourlong film of quips and sight gags, and shots of him strumming a ukulele and lollygagging with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Donald Trump, Bill Gates and Jimmy Buffett made cameo appearances.
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Buffett, the entertainer, who invested in Berkshire 20 years ago and, those close to the family say, may be a very distant cousin to the Berkshire boss. Buffett, the billionaire investor, quickly dispensed with the formalities of the typical annual meeting and, sitting at a folding table at one end of the auditorium, launched into a daylong seminar on his school of investing: At his side, as usual, was his friend and fellow strategist, Charles T. Munger, 80, the vice chairman of the board and as laconic as Mr.
Suggesting a new approach for corporate America on accounting in the formal part of the meeting, Mr.
Buffett said Berkshire's audit committee had acted to increase its independence from management. Instead of awaiting the rare question from outside auditors, he said, Berkshire's audit panel this year raised its own questions. In response to a question, Mr. Buffett said he expected to see inflation ''start to heat up. Combs, 45, has been taking notes at the Berkshire meetings for nearly 15 years and studying them when he gets home.
Friends sometimes wonder what more he could possibly learn after all those years of listening to Mr. Buffett has made a fortune for himself and his shareholders by investing heavily in a few stocks like Coca-Cola and Gillette, and, when he has not been able to find appealing stocks, buying entire companies.
BRK-A Historical Prices | Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Stock - Yahoo Finance
Berkshire owns more than 60 companies, including big insurance concerns and a cowboy boot manufacturer. And in the last four decades, Mr. Buffett has racked up an average annual growth for Berkshire of 22 percent, more than double the performance of the stock market as a whole.
Even so, he is not without detractors. In April, a big pension fund in California took Mr. Buffett to task for being a director of Coca-Cola and engaging in significant business dealings with Coke through various Berkshire units. And in March, Thomas M. Kostigen, a columnist for CBS MarketWatch, declared that Mr. Buffett ''may be the most overrated money manager in history.
The first assumption of Buffett loyalists is that critics are on the wrong track. View all New York Times newsletters. The questioners Saturday were mainly deferential toward Mr.
But the first asked about the purported conflict for him as a director of Coke and a proposal that he leave its board. Buffett said, adding that Coke and Berkshire's business dealings were slight and that Berkshire's ownership of 8.
During the technology boom, Mr. Buffett stayed on the sidelines, saying he did not understand the racy stocks. Pegging him as a typewriter guy in a computer age, many investors jumped ship. Following his own buy-and-hold strategy to perfection, Mr.
Buffett now owns You find yourself getting richer and richer and you say, 'What if this ends? And that's where people make their mistake. They tend to diversify away from their winners.
Scargle, whose wife, Jane, died four years ago and who has no children, now flies to places like Hong Kong and Paris and plays golf twice a week, largely because of his Berkshire investment. But he gradually increased his holding to more than shares, many of which came to him when Berkshire bought Blue Chip Stamps for stock, and Mr.
Scargle converted his Blue Chip holdings into Berkshire shares.
Other companies have sometimes outperformed Berkshire and made investors wealthy. But no other stock carries such a high price tag. That is because Mr. Buffett has never split Berkshire's stock. The Story of Warren Buffett. Those Berkshire B shares, which Mr. The Berkshire meeting, the main event of a weekend of cocktail parties, barbecues and bargain shopping at the company's big jewelry and furniture stores in Omaha, is also, for many, an annual reunion.
Combs organized a dinner for a group of Berkshire investors at an elegant horse farm on the edge of Omaha and each year since the friends have reconvened.
They call themselves the Omaha Lounge Suit Society. They wear the regimental tie of a disbanded British colonial unit in India, and open the evening with bagpipes and Champagne.
Buffett said 19, people attended the annual meeting, up from 12, last year. A group of 31 Australians chartered a plane to fly to the meeting, contributing to a surge in attendance from overseas that prompted Mr. Buffett to schedule a special reception for the long-distance travelers late Saturday afternoon. This year, as in the past, several business school professors brought their entire classes to the meeting. The scene was strikingly different when Mr. Scargle attended his first meeting in , held in the cafeteria of National Indemnity, Berkshire's first insurance company.
About 25 people attended, Mr. Scargle said, most of them employees and relatives of Mr. Afterwards, I went up and introduced myself. He said, 'I've got about an hour, anybody who wants to stick around and talk about investing, I'll be glad to do so. By then the crowd had dwindled to Mr. Scargle and three other shareholders.
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