Berkshire Hathaway vs S&P 500: 30 Years of Returns Compared
Warren Buffett built Berkshire Hathaway by beating the S&P 500 over decades, not years. The track record from 1965 to 2025 is one of the best in investing history. But pull up the data on Berkshire's Class B shares (BRK.B), the version most retail investors actually own, and the story splits cleanly into two halves.
Berkshire crushed the S&P 500 from the 1990s through the 2000s. Since about 2010, the two have run roughly even, with the index pulling slightly ahead. Here are the actual numbers.
The headline: $1,000 in BRK.B since 1996
Berkshire Hathaway issued Class B shares in May 1996, partly to make the stock accessible to small investors. A $1,000 investment in BRK.B at issuance is worth approximately $23,407 today. The same $1,000 in the S&P 500 (SPY) is worth $17,169.
Berkshire beat the index by 6,234 percentage points over 30 years. That is the result that built Buffett's reputation. But the gap was not earned evenly across that span.
Returns by start year
The cleanest way to see the two-halves story is to anchor the same comparison at six different start years.
| Start year | $1K in BRK.B | $1K in SPY | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1996 | $23,407 | $17,169 | BRK +$6,238 |
| 2000 | $14,505 | $7,387 | BRK +$7,118 |
| 2005 | $7,974 | $8,102 | tie |
| 2010 | $6,248 | $8,060 | SPY +$1,812 |
| 2015 | $3,318 | $3,921 | SPY +$603 |
| 2020 | $2,128 | $2,203 | SPY +$75 |
The pattern is unmistakable. Investors who bought Berkshire in 1996 or 2000 ended up with substantially more money than S&P 500 holders. Investors who bought in 2010, 2015, or 2020 ended up with slightly less. 2005 was the inflection year - everything before it was a Berkshire decade, everything after has been mostly a tie or a loss to the index.
Why Berkshire dominated the early decades
The 1996-2009 period was exactly the kind of market Berkshire was built for. Two long bear markets (dot-com 2000-2002, financial crisis 2008-2009) destroyed huge chunks of S&P 500 wealth. Berkshire fell less in both. That asymmetry compounds.
Look at the numbers. In 2008, the S&P 500 fell 38%. Berkshire fell about 32%. In 2002, the S&P 500 fell 22%. Berkshire was up 9%. The gap on the downside, combined with strong returns in flat-ish years, drove the outperformance.
Buffett's edge in this era came from three things: insurance float as cheap leverage, concentrated positions in undervalued businesses (Coke, Wells Fargo, GEICO), and the discipline to hold cash when markets got expensive. The 1999-2000 period is the canonical example - Berkshire underperformed the dot-com run-up, then dramatically outperformed the crash.
Why the gap closed after 2010
Three forces converged:
- Berkshire got too big to multiply. By 2010, Berkshire's market cap was roughly $200 billion. By 2026, it is over $1.1 trillion. A trillion-dollar company cannot grow at 20% per year. The math just does not work. Buffett warned about this in shareholder letters as far back as 2007.
- The market favored growth, not value. The 2010s rewarded high-multiple tech stocks and punished value-style discipline. Berkshire owned no Apple position until 2016, no major tech exposure before that. The five biggest stocks in the S&P 500 by 2025 were all tech names that Berkshire either avoided or bought late.
- The cash drag became real. Berkshire's cash pile grew past $300 billion by 2024. In a sustained bull market, cash earning 5% yields when the index is compounding 13% creates a serious headwind. Buffett has acknowledged this directly in recent letters.
The Apple bet that saved the 2010s
Without Apple, Berkshire's last decade would look much worse. Buffett started buying Apple in 2016 and built it into the largest equity position in the portfolio - peaking at over $170 billion in market value before partial trimming in 2024.
Apple alone has returned over +600% since 2016. That single position carried much of Berkshire's stock-side performance over the period when value investing broadly underperformed. It is the most important single decision Berkshire made in the 21st century, and notably one of the few major tech bets Buffett has ever made personally.
What Greg Abel inherits
Buffett's retirement is now formal. Greg Abel takes over as CEO in 2026. The questions facing Abel are the same ones the data has been raising for over a decade:
- Can Berkshire deploy $300+ billion in cash without dragging returns?
- Can it find acquisition targets large enough to move a $1.1 trillion enterprise?
- Will Berkshire's value-leaning style work better in the next decade than it did in the last one?
Abel's track record at Berkshire Hathaway Energy is strong, but running a regulated utility business is different from allocating capital across a sprawling conglomerate. Buffett has said publicly that Abel will be good at the operational job, while Ajit Jain and Todd Combs/Ted Weschler will handle insurance and equity allocation respectively. The question is whether that division of labor produces the same magic.
What this means if you own BRK.B today
The honest read of the data: Berkshire is a defensive S&P 500-like position, not the index-crushing machine it was 25 years ago. That is not a knock on Buffett or Abel. It is just the reality of size.
If your thesis for owning Berkshire is "I want a slightly lower-beta version of the U.S. market with disciplined capital allocation and insurance optionality," that is still intact. If your thesis is "this will outperform the S&P 500 by several percentage points per year," the last 16 years of data argue otherwise.
Buffett himself has said that for most investors, a low-cost S&P 500 index fund is the right answer. He is on record telling his estate trustees to put 90% of his bequest to his wife into an S&P 500 index fund. That recommendation carries more weight given that the data over the last decade and a half has matched it.
The legacy is intact
None of this diminishes what Buffett built. A 30-year track record of beating the index by over a percentage point annually, in a business that compounds, produces life-changing wealth. $10,000 in BRK.B in 1996 is worth $234,070 today. The same $10,000 in the S&P 500 is worth $171,690. The $62,000 gap is the value of Buffett's six-decade career compressed into the only metric that matters.
The retirement marks the end of one of the most extraordinary capital allocation runs in financial history. Whether the next chapter looks like the first or the most recent one is now Greg Abel's question to answer.
Try comparing BRK.B vs SPY directly in our comparison tool, or browse all Berkshire start years.
Related: Best performing stocks of the last 20 years | $1,000 in SPY since 2000 | Apple vs Microsoft over 25 years | Oil stocks during Middle East conflicts (Berkshire's largest energy positions sit inside this set)