| Berkshire Hathaway's traditional Class A stock tops $500,000 It will cost you just over half a million dollars to buy just one share of Berkshire Hathaway's original stock.
On Monday, the company's Class A shares crossed above $500,000 for the first time ever, and on Wednesday they closed above that level for another first.
After going as high as $520,654 during today's trading session, they closed at $512,991. That means Thursday's $518,438 finish is the current record high close.
Berkshire's market value is now $754 billion, making it the country's sixth most valuable company after Tesla's $909 billion.
The stock is up almost 14% so far this year, and almost 320% over the past 10 years.  CFRA Research's Cathy Seifert tells CNBC, "I think a rotation into value names, coupled with Berkshire's exposure to the energy and utility space ... and investors' enthusiasm for Berkshire's aggressive share buybacks drove the shares' performance."
Reuter's Jonathan Stempel notes that investors see Berkshire "as a defensive stock in a market unsettled by events in Ukraine and rising inflation."
He quotes money manager Bill Smead as saying, "They're big and and they're not a tech stock, and investors get comfort from that."
Berkshire's stock was under $20 a share when Buffett took control of the textile company in 1965.
It's now more than $500,000 because Buffett has never split the stock. In that process, holders get additional shares at a set ratio, but the price of each share is reduced to compensate.
In a two-for-one split, for example, someone with 100 shares of a $100 per share stock would wind up with 200 shares of $50 per share stock. Either way, it's $10,000 worth of stock.
Most companies will split a highly appreciated stock because they want to make the per share price more manageable for small investors.
Buffett has said repeatedly he wants to make it difficult.
At the 2004 Berkshire shareholders meeting, he explained, "People who say they aren't interested in a stock that sells in the thousands of dollars a share simply because it sells in the thousands of dollars a share ... would not, as a group, be as intelligent, and informed, and long-term in their outlook, and as in sync with the policies of management" as the shareholders Berkshire already has.  At the 2013 annual meeting, Buffett pointed out that those who can't afford an A share can buy the B shares, which are currently trading at around $342 each. One Class B share is equivalent to 1/1500th of a Class A share in value. The ratio is 1/10,000th, however, for voting rights.
The B shares were created in 1996, Buffett said, because some people "were going to try and make a lot of money off of our shareholders by creating their own split shares."
And in 2010, the B shares were split 50-to-1 to facilitate tax-free exchanges as part of Berkshire's acquisition of BNSF.
That split also cleared the way for the B shares to be added to the S&P 500 stock index.
But when it comes to splitting the A shares, Charlie Munger advised shareholders at the 2013 meeting, "I would not hold your breath" until they change their minds on that.
Buffett bought another $1 billion of OXY stock this week Berkshire purchased an additional 18.1 million shares of Occidental Petroleum for almost $1 billion over the first three days of this week.
An SEC filing Wednesday shows it paid a weighted average of $54.41 per share, a total of $985 million, for the new shares.  In total, Berkshire now reports owning 136.4 million common shares of the oil giant, currently valued at $7.7 billion. That represents more than 13% of OXY's outstanding shares.
All of the them were purchased over the last three weeks.
On March 7, CNBC's Becky Quick reported on "Squawk Box" that Buffett told her, "We started buying on Monday [Feb. 28] and we bought all we could."
Since then, Berkshire has added 45 million more shares to the 91 million shares purchased during the first week of buying.
BUFFETT AROUND THE INTERNET Some links may require a subscription
BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH
  BERKSHIRE'S TOP U.S. STOCK HOLDINGS - Mar 18, 2022
 Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly-traded U.S. stocks by market value, based on today's closing prices.
Holdings are as of December 31, 2021 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway's 13F filing on February 14, 2022, except for Apple, Bank of America, and U.S. Bancorp, which also include shares held as of December 31, 2021 as disclosed in New England Asset Management's 13F filing on February 14, 2022, and except for Occidental Petroleum, which is as of March 16, 2022.
In addition to U.S. stocks, shares held as of December 31, 2021 of China's BYD, as listed in Buffett's 2021 letter to shareholders, are included. The price of those shares in U.S. trading is used to approximate the current market value of the position. The value of the stake as a percentage of the company's market value is fixed at what was listed as of December 31, 2021 in the letter.
The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don't forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)
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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch
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