Berkshire Hathaway Roughly Tripled $10,000 in a Decade. Did It Beat the Market?

Ten years ago this week, on Aug. 25, 2016, Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE:BRKA)(NYSE:BRKB) B shares closed at $148.64. Ten years later, on Aug. 25 of this year, they closed at $504.32.

Berkshire pays no dividend, so the price is the whole return. A $10,000 investment became about $33,900.

The stock roughly tripled, compounding at about 13% a year. That's a good decade by nearly any standard. But the standard that matters most is what the same money would have earned elsewhere -- and that comparison doesn't flatter Berkshire.

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Did it beat the index?

Berkshire did not beat the market over this stretch. The same $10,000 in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEMKT:SPY), with dividends reinvested, grew to about $41,300 over the identical window -- about 15% a year, using the fund's dividend-adjusted price history. The index fund finished about $7,400 ahead on a $10,000 stake.

Some of that is timing. The decade belonged, arguably, to the giant technology companies that came to dominate the index, and lately to an artificial intelligence (AI) building boom. Berkshire's operating businesses -- insurance, freight, power -- mostly sit that race out.

The comparison is worth making anyway, because of what it says about where Berkshire's return came from. Investors didn't, for the most part, decide to pay more for each dollar Berkshire earns. The company earned more dollars.

The business roughly tripled, too

I think the more interesting part of the decade is how closely the stock tracked the company underneath it.

In 2016, Berkshire reported $17.6 billion of full-year operating earnings -- the measure Warren Buffett always told investors to watch, because it leaves out swings in the value of the stock portfolio. In 2025, the company reported $44.5 billion, about two and a half times as much -- though Berkshire has tweaked how it defines the measure over the years.

Per share, the growth was faster. Berkshire has been shrinking its share count through buybacks, from about 1.64 million Class A-equivalent shares in 2016 to about 1.43 million at midyear, about 13% fewer. Spread the bigger earnings over the smaller share count, and per-share operating earnings, as Berkshire reports them, nearly tripled -- roughly in line with the stock.

The growth hasn't been a straight line. Operating earnings slipped in 2025 from $47.4 billion in 2024. But the first half of this year ran 17% ahead of last year's pace, at $24.3 billion, with the BNSF railroad earning $2.9 billion, up about 10% year over year, the energy business up 11%, and the manufacturing, service and retailing group up 15%.

Insurance float grew, too, from about $91.6 billion at the end of 2016 to about $177.5 billion at midyear. Float is the premium money Berkshire holds and invests for its own benefit before claims are paid, and it has long been the engine of the company's compounding. A doubling of float doubles the money available to invest.

Those figures leave out the stock portfolio's gains and losses, though not its dividend income. The gains sit in a separate line Berkshire tells investors not to read too much into from one quarter to the next.

So most of the tripling, arguably, wasn't a change in the market's opinion of Berkshire. It was the business getting bigger, concentrated onto fewer shares.

Is the stock still a bargain?

And the business is still getting bigger. Second-quarter operating earnings rose 16% year over year, and Berkshire repurchased about $4.5 billion of its own stock during the quarter, after $235 million in the first.

Investors have noticed. At about $504 as of this writing, shares sit about 6% below their 52-week high of $537.74, and Berkshire's market value is about $1.1 trillion. Set against the second quarter's operating earnings taken at an annual rate, that works out to about 21 times operating earnings.

To be fair, a stock screener will show a far lower price-to-earnings ratio, near 13. But that figure leans on reported net income, which includes investment gains that swing wildly from quarter to quarter -- Berkshire itself tells investors those amounts are usually meaningless over short periods. The operating measure is the honest one, and on it, the stock is no longer the bargain it arguably was earlier in the decade.

Of course, the index won this decade, and if AI spending keeps carrying the market, it can keep winning. But Berkshire's 10-year math tells a simpler story. The stock roughly tripled because the business roughly tripled. At about 21 times operating earnings, a buyer today is paying for that to continue.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have positions in Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.