Berkshire Hathaway has enough cash to buy Target, Starbucks, and Nike

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A-2.13%) grew its cash pile to a record $325.2 billion in the third quarter. That’s enough to buy some of the biggest companies in the world — with cash to spare.

Based on market capitalizations as of Tuesday morning, Berkshire could easily buy Target (TGT-0.56%) ($69.46 billion), Starbucks (SBUX-1.87%) ($109.95 billion), and Nike (NKE-1.11%) ($116.28 billion). All together, those three companies are valued at $295.69 billion.

Berkshire itself has a market capitalization of $954.49 billion. Earlier this year, it briefly hit a $1 trillion market cap, becoming the first U.S. company outside the technology sector to hit the milestone.

Shares of the sprawling Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate are up more than 22% year-to-date, narrowly beating out the benchmark S&P 500 index, which is up about 20% so far this year. The company’s shares are valued at $678,000 apiece.

Berkshire also added $48.3 billion to its cash hoard in the quarter, including by freezing stock buybacks — meaning it didn’t repurchase any shares of its own company.

To grow its cash pile, Berkshire has embarked on a selling spree. In the third quarter, the conglomerate sold $36.1 billion worth of stock, including slashing its stakes in longtime investments Apple (AAPL-0.39%) and Bank of America (BAC-1.02%), the company disclosed in regulatory filings Saturday. Meanwhile, it purchased just $1.5 billion of stock in that same period.

In the three months ending on Sept. 30, Berkshire shed roughly a quarter of its remaining stake in Apple to $69.9 billion — the fourth consecutive quarter of cuts to its holdings of the iPhone maker. That’s down by almost two-thirds from the $174.3 billion it owned at the start of the year and comes after Berkshire halved its Apple stake in the second quarter.

The company also dumped about $10 billion of its Bank of America holdings in a series of sales starting in mid-July.