#398: Berkshire Hathaway Closes Over $200,000

From NBCNews.com: If you want a piece of Warren Buffett, the second richest man in America, it will now cost you $200,000. That's the price a Class A share of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, reached in trading on Thursday. That's just one share for the price of a nice six-bedroom, four-bath house in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. While many companies use stock splits to keep their per-share price under $1000, or even below $100, Buffett isn't a fan of that maneuver because he thinks it encourages short-term trading rather than long-term ownership. As a result, Berkshire's Class A has, by far, the largest dollar price per share for any stock trading in the U.S. Berkshire first closed above $1,000 per share on Aug. 26, 1983, a few days before Buffett celebrated his 53rd birthday. It took almost another 9 years to reach $10,000 on Oct. 16, 1992. The stock closed at $100,000 a share just over 14 years after that on Oct. 23, 2006. According to the last Forbes magazine survey, Buffett's personal wealth is $58.5 billion, second only to Bill Gates at $72 billion.