Berkshire Hathaway’s purchases of Liberty Media’s Sirius XM tracking stocks have topped one billion dollars since they began in early January, as the company reveals three more days of buying late last month.
Sirius XM tracking stock buys top $1 billion for the year
Berkshire Hathaway’s purchases of Liberty Media’s Sirius XM tracking stocks have topped one billion dollars since they began in early January, with the company revealing three more days of buying late last month.
On one of those days, March 26, Berkshire spent $283 million, the largest one-day total so far, eclipsing the $236 million it paid on March 12 for LSXMA and LSXMK.
The most recent buys were detailed infilings late in the evening of March 28, after the market closed ahead of Good Friday (and after last week’s edition of this newsletter.)
As of that filing, Berkshire held 32.8 million LSXMA shares and 65.5 million LSXMK shares with a total market value of almost $2.7 billion.
More than one-third of the total holdings have been purchased this year.
But his $133 billion as of the early March date used to create the list, which is an all-time high for him, wasn’t enough to keep him from sliding one notch to sixth place in the annual ranking. (His “Real-Time” estimated wealth, according to Forbes, is $138 billion.)
Like last year, he appears just above his friend Bill Gates, who is seventh with $128 billion, followed by Steve Ballmer ($121 billion), Mukesh Ambani ($116 billion, and Larry Page ($114 billion).
(In Bloomberg’s ranking, Gates is two slots ahead of Buffett, $153 billion to $138 billion.)
Even though Buffett has given away almost 379 million Class B Berkshire shares to the Gates Foundation and foundations run by family members over nearly two decades, the company’s stock gains have kept him in Forbes’s top ten.
If he had held on to those shares instead, his net wealth would be approximately $292 billion, putting him $59 billion ahead of the current #1.
