These 5 Companies Own 22% of U.S. Bancorp Stock

A branch of U.S. Bancorp.

A friend of mine once worked at a Portland, Oregon-based money manager that catered to, among other people, former longtime employees of U.S. Bancorp (USB 1.57%) who became wealthy holding its stock. This got me thinking about other investors that have benefited from the bank's ascent, leading me to draw up a list of U.S. Bancorp's five biggest shareholders, which you can find in the slideshow below.

The companies on the list own a combined 22% of U.S. Bancorp's outstanding common stock. While most of the slots are filled by institutional money managers such as Fidelity and Vanguard, the most interesting company to make the list is Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. I say that because Buffett has a particular knack for identifying the best-run banks in America, including Wells Fargo (WFC 2.83%) and M&T Bank (MTB 2.12%), among others.

This is good company to be in, as all three of these banks have outperformed the market over the past two decades. Since 1995, shares of Wells Fargo have soared by 1,540%, M&T Bank's by 1,310%, and U.S. Bancorp's by 734%. The story is the same if you go back further, as M&T Bank, Wells Fargo, and U.S. Bancorp are among the 5 best-performing bank stocks since 1983.

Without further ado, then, I encourage you to scroll through the brief slideshow below to discover all five of U.S. Bancorp's biggest shareholders -- a table with raw data follows it.

Data source: Morningstar, Yahoo! Finance, author's calculations.