????In fact, a number of Buffett's ardent fans say that the value that the market puts on the Oracle of Omaha these days is grand total of zero. How do they get at that conclusion? They say if you were to split up Berkshire and sell if off for parts, and then split up the proceeds to investors the product would be $160,000 a share, according to Buffett investor David Winters, who runs the Wintergreen Advisors, or roughly 33% more than the just over $119,650 the shares trade at now. (Berkshire also has a class of cheaper B shares (BRKB) shares that trade for $79.76. The break-up value for those shares is just over $106.) Says Winters, "You are getting Buffett's brain for free."
????But that doesn't mean that Berkshires stock is unlikely to drop if Buffett were to suddenly announce he was leaving the company. Conglomerates, which is what Berkshire is now, often trade a discount to the sum of their parts, sometimes as large as 50%.
????Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager and Buffett investor, has said it the past that the market is undervaluing Berkshire. Still, he agrees that if Buffett's cancer prognosis was that he had four months to live, the stock would at least drop by 10%, or roughly $11 billion. Perhaps, the biggest value that Buffett adds to Berkshire is his ability to pick up businesses and investments at better terms than others because he is Buffett. Tilson says, for example, Buffett was able to buy Israeli metal company Iscar in 2006 at a 50% discount to what others might have had to pay. During the financial crisis, Buffett was able to pick up shares in Goldman Sachs at better terms than were even secured by the U.S. government. Companies, particularly ones seemingly in trouble, want to be able to say that Buffett believes in them. All that is certainly baked into the value of Berkshire's shares but how much is hard to tell. "Buffett is a smart guy who does smart things," says Winters. "No one knows how long he is going to live and how many more smart things he will do."
????But what is clear is that Buffett's window for smart moves is far more closed than open.
