Here's how rich you'd be if you had bet $1,000 on Warren Buffett back in the day (BRK.A, BRK.B)

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May 5, 2017 8:25 PM

Here’s how $1,000 invested Berkshire Hathaway in a given year would be worth today under CEO Warren Buffett.

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Saturday is the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, and CEO Warren Buffett and his right-hand man Charlie Munger will answer investors' questions.

Over the last half-century, Buffett has taken a failing textile company and turned it into a legendary conglomerate.

Using historical price data for Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares from a retrospective analysis of Buffett's outsize returns and Yahoo Finance, we calculated how much $1,000 of Berkshire stock would be worth today if you had invested that money at the end of each year of Buffett's tenure.

That $1,000 invested in 1964, when Buffett took over the company and shares were just $19, would be worth about $13 million today, based on the $249,010 price of the stock on Wednesday — and $1,000 invested in 1990 would be worth $37,305 today.

Here's a chart showing the current value of Berkshire Hathaway stock bought at different times in the last 50 years:

Investing in the first couple of decades of Buffett's stewardship would have grown the $1,000 to several million dollars by today. After about 1980 or so, those gains were much more modest, although still impressive.

To get a better handle on values in the last 30 or so years, which are hard to see in the above chart because of the large returns in earlier years, here's the same chart using a logarithmic scale, in which the vertical axis is incremented in powers of 10, making it easier to compare the range of price returns we're looking at:

We'll have full coverage of the annual meeting on Saturday.

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