No. of Recommendations: 4
One might argue that the best for us as Berkshire shareholders would be a huge Apple dividend, then have the cash received by Berkshire used to buy Berkshire shares.
Interesting exercise: would that benefit us more, or less, than Apple buying Berkshire shares?
Intuitively, I would say that that the former is far superior to the latter.
If Apple pays a special dividend, say $100b, then Berkshire gets $5.8b of it, pays the taxes (50% of 21%?) and buys back its own shares. If you think Berkshire is worth 20% more than it's going for on the market, then using the after-tax $5.19b to buy that gets us about $1.04b of new intrinsic value.
If Apple buys Berkshire shares for an equivalent amount, then Apple gets a $20b boost to its intrinsic value, but we only own 5.8% of Apple, so we only get $1.16b's of new (pre-tax) intrinsic value.
So my intuition seems wrong, maybe just buying Berkshire shares would be a little better, as long as we intend to hold onto those Apple shares for a long time, since the difference is in the tax. IF the tax is postponed for a very long time, which I presume is Buffett's intention, then this solution would work, at least for Berkshire.
The third option, Apple using that $100b to repurchase shares (which is approximately what it is doing right now, means we get $5.18b more Apple shares and $5.18b less cash. If Apple is overvalued by the market right now, as I think, maybe by 50%, that means we have a higher Apple stake (Yay!) but we will stil have lost $1.7b in intrinsic value (Boo).
One other thing - I suppose we should start including, in these discussions, the new 1% excise tax on repurchases, which is in place since the beginning of 2023. This would tip the balance slightly away from repurchases and towards dividends (although of course if Berkshire uses its Apple dividends to repurchase its own shares, it would end up paying it anyways.
dtb
