[Photo: Berkshire Hathaway Home Office]

Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Class A shares closed above $250,000 on Tuesday for the first time, an eye-popping figure that again raises the question: Why has Mr. Buffett never split the shares?

Along with Mr. Buffett’s folksy demeanor and his decades-long success as a stock picker, Berkshire’s gigantic stock price has been one of the key elements that has fueled the cult following that’s built up around the “Oracle of Omaha” over the years. The stock pierced the $1,000 level in 1983, passed $10,000 in 1992 and hit $100,000 for the first time in 2006.

Here are three reasons why Berkshire’s chairman and CEO has been against a split:

1. EGO.    The value of Berkshire’s Class A shares dwarf the 2nd-most-expensive stock in the U.S. market, Seaboard, an agribusiness and transportation company that counts Butterball turkey among its holdings. Seaboard closed at $3,900 a share Tuesday, but it has far fewer outstanding shares than Berkshire, and its market capitalization of $4.57 billion is a fraction of Berkshire’s $412 billion.

And at $250,419 a share, Berkshire stock is up more than 3,300,000% since Mr. Buffett first put in a buy order for 2,000 shares with Wall Street broker Tweedy, Browne and Reilly back in December 1962. He paid $7.50 a share for his initial stake.

“I can gear my whole life by the price of Berkshire,” he said in The Snowball, written by biographer Alice Schroeder.

2. IT CHANGES NOTHING.   In a stock split, a company increases the number of shares outstanding while lowering the price accordingly. Splits don’t change anything fundamentally about a company or its valuation. Mr. Buffett long argued that case, saying it was well understood by existing holders of Berkshire shares. He described the company’s investor base as being composed of intelligent, rational people who helped keep Berkshire’s share price relatively close to the value of its underlying assets. He worried that splitting the shares would attract a different sort of investor.

3. THERE’S ANOTHER WAY TO INVEST IN BERKSHIRE.    In 1996, Buffett introduced so-called “Baby Bs,” or Class B shares, that were the equivalent of 1/30th of the existing shares–though with just 1/200th of the voting rights. At the time, he considered Berkshire shares to be overvalued, and he cautioned that he didn’t think it was wise to buy the stock. People bought it anyway.

Mr. Buffett showed no compunction about splitting the B shares 50-for-1 in 2010, when he used Berkshire stock to help pay for the $27 billion acquisition of railroad Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp.

B shares now make up more than half of Berkshire’s market cap. They closed Tuesday at $166.95.