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Buffett’s Four-Comma Club

News and notes from the Wall Street hype machine as Berkshire Hathaway hits $1 trillion, Sam Altman’s OpenAI trades at 33x (!) revenue, and Two Sigma continues to flirt with disaster.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has surpassed a $1 trillion dollar market valuation.
Berkshire stock is now trading at more than $700,000, and on Wednesday, the company surpassed a market valuation of $1 trillion. Photo: Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage
William D. Cohan
September 1, 2024

Longtime readers will remember that, way back in 1990, I made the wise decision to buy 10 shares of Berkshire Hathaway—there was only one class of stock back then—when it was trading for $12,000 a share. At the time, I was an associate at Lazard, and the one Quotron machine on our floor only displayed stock prices to four digits, not five—so I thought the stock was trading for $1,200 a share, not $12,000 a share. When the Lazard stock trader informed me that the trade had been successful, and I now had to come up with $120,000, I went into panic mode. I didn’t have $120,000 back then, or anything close to that amount.