What Is Berkshire Hathaway? Businesses, Ownership and Market Cap

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Berkshire Hathaway is a U.S. holding company that owns dozens of operating businesses outright and also holds large stakes in publicly traded companies. Its best-known subsidiaries include the auto insurer GEICO, the BNSF railroad, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Duracell, Dairy Queen and Fruit of the Loom. Its stock portfolio has included major positions in companies such as Apple, Bank of America and Coca-Cola. Warren Buffett ran the company for six decades. In 2025 he announced he would step down as CEO, and Greg Abel became chief executive in January 2026, with Buffett remaining chairman. Berkshire’s shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange in two classes, BRK.A and BRK.B, and its market value has exceeded $1 trillion. That puts it among the largest public companies in the world.

How Berkshire Hathaway works as a holding company

Berkshire owns other companies in two ways.

1. Wholly owned subsidiaries. Berkshire buys the whole business, or nearly all of it. The subsidiary’s profits flow into Berkshire’s earnings.
2. Minority stakes in public companies. Berkshire buys shares on the open market. It does not control those companies, but it receives dividends and benefits when the shares rise in value.

Headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, is famously small. Subsidiaries keep their own management teams and largely run themselves. The parent company has one central role: deciding where to send the cash those businesses generate. It can reinvest the money in an existing subsidiary, buy a new company, buy stocks, repurchase Berkshire shares or hold cash. Berkshire has paid a dividend only once in its history, in 1967. It has instead retained earnings and, more recently, repurchased stock when management judged the shares to be undervalued.

Berkshire is not a mutual fund or a hedge fund. It is an operating corporation whose shares anyone can buy on an exchange. It charges no management or performance fees, and most of its value sits in the railroads, utilities, insurers and manufacturers it owns. A fund manager such as BlackRock instead earns fees for managing other people’s money.

History: from textile mill to conglomerate

The company traces back to two New England textile companies, Berkshire Fine Spinning Associates and Hathaway Manufacturing, which merged in 1955 to form Berkshire Hathaway. The textile industry was in long-term decline. Buffett began buying the stock in the early 1960s because it looked cheap relative to its assets, and he gained control in 1965.

Rather than pour money into the struggling mills, Buffett used Berkshire as a vehicle to redirect capital. In 1967 Berkshire bought National Indemnity, an Omaha insurer, which started the insurance operation that still anchors the company. Over the following decades Berkshire added businesses such as See’s Candies and the Buffalo News. It shut down its textile operations in 1985.

Some of the larger milestones that followed:

• GEICO: Berkshire held a large minority stake for years and acquired the rest of the company in 1996.
• General Re: the reinsurer was acquired in 1998, expanding Berkshire’s insurance footprint.
• BNSF: Berkshire completed its purchase of the railroad in 2010, one of its largest acquisitions.
• Precision Castparts: the aerospace parts maker was bought in 2016.

Charlie Munger, Buffett’s longtime partner, served as vice chairman until his death in November 2023.

What Berkshire Hathaway owns

Berkshire’s holdings fall into four broad groups.

Insurance and float

Insurance is the largest and most important part of the business. Berkshire’s insurers include GEICO, National Indemnity, General Re and the Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group.

These operations matter because of float. An insurer collects premiums up front and pays claims later, sometimes years later. Between those two points the insurer holds money that belongs, in effect, to future claimants. Berkshire invests that money.

The mechanics work like this. Suppose an insurer collects $100 in premiums and eventually pays $95 in claims and expenses. It makes a $5 underwriting profit and also earns returns on the $100 while it holds it. If claims and expenses come to $105 instead, the $5 loss is a cost of using the float. That cost is worth paying only if the investment returns on the float exceed it.

Buffett recognized early that a disciplined insurer could generate large, low-cost float. That float funded many of Berkshire’s stock purchases and acquisitions.

BNSF and Berkshire Hathaway Energy

Berkshire owns BNSF, one of the largest freight railroads in North America. It also owns Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which holds electric and gas utilities, pipelines and renewable generation assets.

These are capital-intensive, regulated or semi-regulated businesses. They need constant reinvestment, and in return they produce steady long-term cash flows.

Manufacturing, service and retail

A broad group of other subsidiaries covers industrial and consumer businesses:

• Industrial: Precision Castparts (aerospace components) and Lubrizol (specialty chemicals).
• Housing: Clayton Homes, a manufactured housing builder and lender.
• Consumer brands: Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, International Dairy Queen, See’s Candies and Pampered Chef.
• Services: NetJets, which sells fractional ownership of private jets.

Berkshire does not try to integrate these companies with one another. Each is judged on its own earnings and on how much capital it needs.

Public stock portfolio

Separately from the companies it owns, Berkshire holds a concentrated portfolio of publicly traded stocks. Long-standing positions have included Apple, Bank of America, American Express and Coca-Cola. Over time, Berkshire has also held stakes in companies such as United Parcel Service.

Buffett has avoided wide diversification. He prefers to put large amounts into a relatively small number of companies he understands and expects to hold for many years. The individual positions change as Berkshire buys and sells, so a list of holdings is a snapshot rather than a fixed portfolio.

Class A and Class B shares

Berkshire trades on the New York Stock Exchange under two tickers.

• Class A (BRK.A): the original shares. Berkshire has never split them, so their price has compounded along with the company’s value to hundreds of thousands of dollars per share. Each Class A share can be converted into 1,500 Class B shares at the holder’s option. The conversion does not work in reverse.
• Class B (BRK.B): introduced in 1996 so smaller investors could buy in without paying the full Class A price. A 50-for-1 split in 2010, done in connection with the BNSF acquisition, set the current economic ratio. One Class B share has the economic rights of 1/1,500 of a Class A share but only 1/10,000 of the voting rights.

This is why Berkshire’s stock looks so expensive. The Class A price is high because the shares were never split, not because the company costs more relative to its earnings. To compare valuations, investors use measures such as price to book value or price to earnings.

Berkshire Hathaway market cap and how it’s calculated

Market capitalization is the total market value of a company’s outstanding shares. Because one Class A share equals 1,500 Class B shares economically, Berkshire’s is calculated in Class A equivalents:

Market cap = Class A price × (Class A shares + Class B shares ÷ 1,500)

For a hypothetical example, suppose there are 500,000 Class A shares and 1.5 billion Class B shares, and the Class A price is $700,000. The Class B shares equal 1,000,000 Class A equivalents, so total equivalents are 1.5 million, and market cap is $1.05 trillion.

Market cap is not the same as “net worth.” Berkshire’s book value is the accounting value of assets minus liabilities. It reflects the stocks it holds at market prices, but wholly owned businesses are generally carried at cost adjusted over time. Market cap is what investors are willing to pay for the whole company. The gap between those two figures is one way investors judge whether the stock is cheap or expensive.

Who owns Berkshire Hathaway

Berkshire is a public company owned by its shareholders: individuals, pension plans, index funds and other institutions. Warren Buffett is the largest individual shareholder. Most of his holdings are Class A shares, which gives him a voting influence much larger than his economic stake would suggest.

Buffett has pledged to give away nearly all of his fortune. He has made large annual gifts of Berkshire stock to charitable foundations, converting Class A shares to Class B before donating them. Because the B shares carry far fewer votes, these gifts gradually shift voting power as his holdings shrink.

Leadership and succession

Investors long asked whether Berkshire’s results depended on Buffett personally. In 2021, Munger appeared to indicate at the annual meeting that Greg Abel would succeed Buffett as CEO. Abel was then vice chairman of non-insurance operations and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, and Buffett later confirmed him as the planned successor. Ajit Jain, vice chairman of insurance operations, has long led the insurance businesses. Since Abel took over in January 2026, the structure Buffett built is meant to outlast him: decentralized subsidiaries, a large cash position and a capital allocator at the top.

Value investing at Berkshire

Buffett’s approach grew out of value investing: buying a security for less than its estimated intrinsic value, meaning the present value of the cash it is expected to produce. A value investor expects, but cannot be sure, that the market price will move toward that value over time.

Under Munger’s influence, Buffett broadened the idea. He would pay a fair price for an excellent business with durable competitive advantages, then hold it for a long time. That is why so many Berkshire positions stay in place for decades.

The long-run results are what made Berkshire famous. According to Berkshire’s 2021 annual report, its stock delivered a total gain of 3,641,613% from 1964 to 2021. Over the same period the S&P 500, including dividends, gained 30,209%. In annualized terms, that is 20.1% a year for Berkshire versus 10.5% for the index. Past performance does not predict future returns, and Buffett himself has said Berkshire’s size makes repeating such gains much harder.

The Bottom Line

Berkshire Hathaway matters to investors who want one stock that holds insurers, a railroad, utilities, manufacturers and a concentrated stock portfolio without paying fund fees. The high Class A price reflects shares that were never split, so valuation measures like price to book matter more than the quote. Greg Abel now runs a decentralized structure built to outlast Buffett, though the company's size makes repeating its past returns much harder.