What Stock Has the Highest Price?

Even relatively new companies often have share prices that run into the hundreds of dollars per share. This has left many investors asking what stock commands the single highest price.

 

Interestingly, there is one company whose stock trades at over $400,000 per share. Here’s what you need to know about the most pricey stock in the world and some of its closest competitors.

 

The most expensive stock in today’s market is Berkshire Hathaway Class A (NYSE:BRK-A).

 

Each Class A share of Warren Buffett’s famous conglomerate trades for over $450,000. In fact, the company’s share price has become so high that NASDAQ had to upgrade its core computer code in 2021 to continue recording values accurately.

 

The previous computer architecture was unable to store values as high as the BRK-A share price. 

 

The main reason that Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares are so expensive is that Warren Buffett is famously opposed to stock splits.

 

Buffett champions the idea of investing in companies that produce solid growth over long time horizons. By this reasoning, stock splits are both unnecessary and actively detrimental to achieving maximum share price.

 

Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares represent an extremely rare case of a legacy company that has never gone through a stock split. When Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, the stock traded for just $19 per share. An investor who put $1,000 into those shares at that point would have over $24,140,000 today.

 

Given Buffett’s historical resistance to the idea of splitting Berkshire’s Class A shares, it seems extremely unlikely that a stock split will occur while the legendary value investor remains at the helm. While it’s impossible to rule out stock splits indefinitely, investors shouldn’t be planning to buy a split version of the Class A shares anytime soon.

 

With that said, retail investors can still purchase more affordable Class B shares in Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:BRK-B). These shares trade for the much more modest price and are specifically meant to give retail investors a more accessible method for buying Berkshire stock.

Interestingly, Buffett has allowed the Class B shares to split in the past. In 2010, the company split the shares on a 50-to-1 basis. The reasoning for allowing the split seems to have been to keep them affordable for investors without enough capital to buy the astronomically high Class A shares.

 

Class B shares do come with the caveat of not conferring much voting power to shareholders. While each share of Class A stock entitles the holder to one vote, the initial Class B offering only gave the holder 1/200th of a vote.

 

After the 2010 split, that amount was lowered even more to 1/10,000th of a vote. For all intents and purposes, this means that Class A holders exercise control over voting within the company.

 

If you aren’t concerned about voting with your shares, however, the limited voting rights that come with Class B shares shouldn’t be a serious handicap.

 

Although no other company can come anywhere close to the share price of Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares, there are others with prices well into the thousands of dollars. Below, you’ll find a list of the four most expensive stocks besides Berkshire.

With an NVR share price of $5,155, home construction company NVR (NYSE:NVR) is the second most pricey stock in the US market.

 

The company’s shares took off in the late 1990s and early 2000s and have been on a steep upward trajectory ever since. In addition to construction, NVR is also heavily involved in the mortgage banking industry.

Seaboard (NYSE:SEB) is a large commodities company focused mainly on the agricultural market.

 

For more than a century, Seaboard has used a series of mergers and acquisitions to grow into a giant in the agricultural sector. The first business it acquired was a Kansas flour mill in 1918. Today, the company’s stock trades near $4,000 per share.

 

Unlike Seaboard, e-commerce giant Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is a relatively young company that has seen massive success in its first decades in business.

 

Amazon shares currently trade near $3,000 each. As recently as 2009, however, the shares were still priced at under $100. This rapid growth is a testament to how technological disruption can propel stocks to extremely high prices.

 

Rounding out the list of the most expensive stocks is Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), which trades for over $2,500 per share. Alphabet is the parent company of Google, as well as related businesses such as YouTube, and Android.

 

It’s interesting to note that Warren Buffett also had a substantial influence on Alphabet’s share class structure. Initially, Google’s founders were reluctant to take the company public, as they feared that they could lose control to activist shareholders. After meeting with Buffett, however, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to pursue something very similar to Berkshire Hathaway’s two-tier stock system.

By dividing the shares into Class A and Class B, the founders were able to retain control over their company after taking it public. In all probability, Buffett’s influence also extended to the issuance of a Class A stock split for Alphabet. Though only time will tell, it seems unlikely that Alphabet would split its higher-tier stock anytime soon.

 

As you can see, Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares sit far above even the closest competitors in terms of pure share price. By resisting stock splits over decades of growth, the company has created an extremely valuable asset over the past half century.

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