Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares top $600,000 for the first time as Warren Buffett's conglomerate edges toward $1 trillion milestone

• Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares closed above $600,000 for the first time this week.
• Warren Buffett's conglomerate is now just $120 billion away from hitting a $1 trillion valuation.
• Berkshire Hathaway stock has returned 3,215,489% since Buffett took over the company in 1965.

Berkshire Hathaway notched a new record this week when its Class A shares closed above $600,000 on Wednesday.

Warren Buffett's conglomerate is now the seventh largest US company and trades at a valuation of about $880 billion, putting it just $120 billion away from the $1 trillion milestone.

Berkshire Hathaway is now in a race with Eli Lilly to become the first $1 trillion US company that is not a technology firm. Eli Lilly's market valuation is about $130 billion behind Berkshire Hathaway at $749 billion.

Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, when its stock was trading at about $19 per share. Since then, the stock has soared 3,215,489% to $610,962 on Friday, and all along Buffett has resisted a stock split.

Instead, Berkshire Hathaway introduced lower priced Class B shares in 1996. At the time, Class A shares traded just above $30,000, while Class B shares started trading at 1/30th the price, around $1,000. Today, Berkshire's Class B shares trade just over $400, in part due to a stock split in 2010 after Berkshire purchased railroad operator BNSF.

Buffett's reasoning behind not splitting the Class A shares is his quest to attract high-quality buy-and-hold investors that are more focused on the long-term growth and sustainability of the business rather than the price level of the stock.

In a 1995 shareholders meeting, Buffett said splitting the stock would likely attract short-term investors who had little knowledge about the underlying business.

"I know that if we had something that it was a lot easier for anybody with $500 to buy, that we would get an awful lot of people buying it who didn't have the faintest idea what they were doing," Buffett said.

The last price milestone reached by Berkshire Hathaway's Class A shares was in March 2022, when the stock crossed above the $500,000 threshold.

Since then, Berkshire Hathaway has amassed a nearly 30% stake in Occidental Petroleum and bought insurance company Alleghany for $11.6 billion.

And the company's investment portfolio if individual stocks has swelled to nearly $350 billion.

Here are the latest portfolio trades made by Berkshire Hathaway during the fourth quarter.