Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is now a $1 trillion company

The company is just the eighth U.S. company to reach the milestone, joining an exclusive club that includes Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post). Electric-car maker Tesla reached the mark in 2021, but has since fallen below the threshold, as its profit plunged and as it faces stiffer competition from China.

The development reflects the wisdom of Buffett’s “value investing” technique, a strategy of identifying undervalued stocks and holding onto them for long periods. The approach has earned Buffett the nickname “Oracle of Omaha” and has made him the world’s sixth-richest person with a net worth of $133 billion, according to Forbes.

Berkshire Hathaway is a holding company that owns dozens of subsidiaries in a diversified portfolio, including car insurer GEICO, food company Kraft Heinz and public relations company Business Wire. It also sits on hundreds of billions of dollars of cash.

Buffett, who turns 94 years old on Friday, designated Greg Abel, one of his top lieutenants, as the heir apparent in 2021. Buffett and the late Charles Munger, formerly Berkshire’s vice chair, had said that they trusted Abel to lead Berkshire via slow and steady investing, as opposed to today’s frenzied investment climate marked by astronomical valuations, The Washington Post reported.

Buffett has sought to assure investors that, even after he leaves this world, Berkshire will function largely as it does today, regardless of who leads it. “We have the right people in place — the right directors, managers and prospective successors to those managers,” he told shareholders in 2014. “Our culture, furthermore, is embedded throughout their ranks. Our system is also regenerative.”