To The Moon

Watch out, Elon. Warren is gaining on you. With the sharp drop in shares of Tesla this year, the market value of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A, BRK.B) is approaching that of the leader in electric vehicles. Berkshire, led by longtime CEO Warren Buffett, is demonstrating its defensive attributes in a bear market with its class A share down about 7% this year to $419,000—against a nearly 25% decline in the S&P 500 index. Tesla stock is off 37.7% to $219.35 this year, reflecting some recent disappointment on vehicle deliveries and the sharp pullback in growth stocks. CEO Elon Musk’s pursuit of Twitter hasn’t helped. Berkshire sits on what Buffett, 92, calls a Fort Knox balance sheet with over $100 billion in cash and equivalents, mostly U.S. Treasury bills. Investors will be eager to see how much of that cash Buffett deployed in the second quarter when Berkshire reports financial results in early November. Tesla closed at $219.35 on Monday, up 7.01% for the day, while Berkshire’s A shares closed at $419,100.8, up 1.54%. Berkshire now has a market value of about $615 billion, against Tesla at $687 billion. At the start of 2022, Tesla was valued at $1.1 trillion, $450 billion more than Berkshire. Berkshire already has blown past flagging Meta Platforms and Nvidia this year to rank sixth in the S&P 500 by market value. Berkshire is behind Apple , Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon.com, and Tesla. Shares of Meta and Nvidia, which outranked Berkshire in the S&P 500 at the beginning of 2022, are both down about 60% this year. If it can get past Tesla, Berkshire will be hard pressed to catch the No. 4 company, Amazon, which is valued at more than $1 trillion. Berkshire’s resilience this year shows the benefits of Buffett’s methodical approach to building value over more than a half-century while providing sleep-at-night comfort to shareholders.