Warren Buffett's Exclusive $300 Club

This column was originally published on RealMoney on Nov. 9 at 1:44 p.m. EST. It's being republished as a bonus for TheStreet.com readers.

With Google sitting in the $300 club for quite some time now, it's worth taking a look at some of the other members of this rarefied group. A common thread among all of them is their link to one man (A Sith lord? A Jedi master?) sitting in a 10-person office in Omaha, Neb.

The granddaddy of them all, and also the member of the S&P 500 with the largest amount of cash on the books at $43 billion, is Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A Quote). The Class A shares trade for about $90,000; the company is run by Warren Buffett, the consensus pick for greatest investor ever (it's worth mentioning that I wrote the book on this).

Berkshire's primary business is property and casualty insurance and reinsurance. If run properly, an insurance business can have a "cost of float" of zero -- that is, you spend no more in payouts than you collect in premiums. Berkshire is also involved in many other diversified businesses such as furniture rental, newspapers and candy, to name a few. ...