you are ignoring all the wholly owned non-insurance businesses.

It is a fair hit on how I worded the conclusion. Thanks for pointing out.

I wasn’t intending to assign zero value to the wholly owned businesses. BNSF, BHE, manufacturing, services and the other operating businesses got to worth substantially more than their accounting carrying values.

Where I went too far was saying that the balance sheet breakdown shows Berkshire is “cheaper-looking than it really is.” It doesn’t establish that. What it really shows is that 1.45× book alone is not enough to determine whether Berkshire is cheap or expensive, because book value mixes cash, securities, insurance liabilities and operating businesses whose intrinsic values can differ substantially from their carrying values. I would withdraw that particular conclusion.

My narrower point should just be that Berkshire’s enormous cash position gives it tremendous buyback capacity, but capacity by itself does not establish that the shares are undervalued. That purely depends on price relative to intrinsic value.