A Closer Look At Motley Fool And Berkshire Hathaway -- February 10, 2022

Two links:

• these four stocks are netting Warren Buffett a combined $3.1 billion in annual dividend income:
• Bank of America: $870 billion
• OXY: $800 billion
• Apple: $800 billion
• Coca-Cola, the laggard, only contributing $700 billion to Warren's annual income
• these four stocks make nearly 75% of Warren Buffett's portfolio:
• only one really counts, AAPL: $160 billion, 45% of invested assets
• Bank of America: $50 billion market value, 15% of invested assets
• and then we drop to "it almost doesn't matter": $30 billion, only 8% of invested assets
• and then it really doesn't matter: Coca-Cola: $25 billion, only 7% of invested assets

The reason I posted those two articles is because these two articles tell only part of the story. In addition to invested assets, Warren owns several companies in their entirety. Most notable: Burlington Northern railroad which used to trade publicly under the ticker symbol BNI.

I assume a clever expert could figure out how much BNI contributes to Buffett's wealth, but I'm neither clever nor an expert. 

But, one can use UNP as a proxy. When BNI last traded publicly, BNI and UNP were virtually identical, although UNP might have been somewhat better when it came to market value, financial statistics, etc.

So, let's look at UNP today and "assume" those numbers are very close to what BNI would be if broken out separated and still paid dividends. So, these are UNP numbers, but assume they are very similar to BNI:

• market cap: $160 billion; all numbers rounded, but UNP market cap actually exceeds Berkshire Hathaway's AAPL holdings;
• shares outstanding: 636.9 million
• annual div: $4.72 / share = annual dividends paid: $3.0062 billion -- or almost equal to the entire combined dividend from this top four invested assets ($3.1 billion)
• and Warren gets 100% of those dividends
• compare to paltry $800 billion from Apple which makes up almost 50% of Berkshire Hathaway's invested assets;