What’s Gone Wrong At Berkshire Hathaway
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Essay: Where Buffett Went Wrong
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Today’s Mailbag
Editor’s note: On May 16, 2025, Porter released The Better Than Berkshire Index, designed to show Complete Investor subscribers that they can outperform Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Over the next two weeks, using the insights he has learned from Buffett himself over the decades, Porter will explain exactly what’s gone wrong with Berkshire and how investors can build a portfolio that can do much, much better…
On September 9, 2024, Ajit Jain sold 200 Class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) at an average price of $695,418 per share.
The transaction cleared roughly $139.1 million in cash. It was the largest single sale of Berkshire stock Jain had ever made. It was also 55% of his personal stake.
Ajit Jain is no ordinary shareholder. He is the man Warren Buffett built the modern Berkshire Hathaway around. Jain joined Berkshire in 1986. He runs the insurance operations – every part of the float machine that, more than any other element of the company, has produced the compounded returns Buffett is famous for. When in his 2018 letter Buffett described auto-insurance giant GEICO as having added more than $50 billion to Berkshire’s intrinsic value, Jain was the man responsible for those numbers. When in the past the Berkshire annual meetings cut away from Buffett or the late Vice Chair Charlie Munger, the third microphone has been Jain’s… every year, for two decades.
Five days before Jain’s September 200-share sale, Berkshire’s Class A shares had peaked above $727,000. Less than two weeks earlier, Berkshire’s market capitalization had crossed $1 trillion for the first time in the company’s history. Jain sold five days off the all-time high.
He has continued to sell. In August 2025, 2,000 Class B shares. In September 2025, 15,000 more Class B shares. The selling has not stopped.
Steve Check runs Check Capital Management, whose largest single position, 24% of the book, is Berkshire Hathaway. Asked by Fortune to interpret Jain’s September sale, he answered honestly:
The only reason I can come up with for why he is selling is he thinks the stock is fully priced – and it is. It’s probably as fully priced as it’s been since before the financial crisis.
Buffett, asked at the 2025 annual meeting about the sale, said nothing of substance. The financial press did not press him.
The man who knows the engine best does not believe the company is worth what the market says it is worth. He is voting with his feet, and he is voting against the price. He is doing it at the all-time high, the $1 trillion mark, the moment of maximum institutional comfort.
Jain is right. The man who runs the only bucket of Berkshire that still compounds at a serious rate looked at the price tag in September 2024 and concluded the rest of the company was not worth it. He has been telling the world ever since.
How To Be Better Than Berkshire
A year ago, I introduced The Better Than Berkshire Index to our Partners and Complete Investor subscribers. Had I introduced it 20 years earlier, it would have been laughable.
