Warren Buffett

• 1. Introduction

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  Warren Buffett's senior yearbook photo at Woodrow Wilson High School carried a single caption: "likes math; a future stockbroker." He was seventeen. By the time he graduated from college a few years later, he had already accumulated $9,800 in savings through a string of childhood businesses, a teen farmland purchase, and a paper route that netted him more than $175 a month. The boy from Omaha, Nebraska, who was born on the 30th of August 1930, would go on to become one of the best-known investors in the world and, by January 2026, hold an estimated net worth of $148.9 billion. What shaped his thinking? How did a textile manufacturer become the vehicle for one of America's largest corporate conglomerates? And what does a man worth nearly $150 billion actually do with his money?

• 2. A Childhood in Business

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  A book borrowed from the Omaha public library at age seven set the course of Warren Buffett's life. The title was One Thousand Ways to Make $1000, and it lit a spark in a child who was already restless with entrepreneurial energy. He sold chewing gum, Coca-Cola, and magazines door to door. He worked in his grandfather's grocery store. By high school, he was delivering newspapers, selling golf balls, selling stamps, and detailing cars.

  On his first income tax return in 1944, Buffett claimed a $35 deduction for the bicycle and watch he used on his paper route. That same discipline with numbers ran through everything he did. In 1945, as a high school sophomore, he and a friend spent $25 on a used pinball machine and placed it in a local barber shop. Within months they had machines in three different shops across Omaha. In 1947, they sold the whole enterprise to a war veteran for $1,200.

  Buffett bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred at age eleven, also buying three shares for his sister Doris Buffett. At fourteen, he used $1,200 in savings to buy a forty-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer. His father, Congressman Howard Buffett, took him to visit the New York Stock Exchange when he was ten, cultivating his curiosity. Even so, after graduating high school and wanting to skip college entirely, Buffett was overruled by his father.

• 3. The Education of a Value Investor

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  Benjamin Graham's name appears again and again in Buffett's story, and for good reason. After Harvard Business School rejected him in the spring of 1950, Buffett learned that Graham taught at Columbia Business School and enrolled immediately. He earned a Master of Science in Economics from Columbia in 1951, and the philosophy he absorbed there stayed with him for the rest of his career.

  Graham's central principle was finding stocks priced below their intrinsic value, what Buffett later called "cigar butts." But Buffett eventually refined this into something of his own: seeking companies with durable competitive advantages, brand loyalty, consistent earnings, and pricing power, and then holding them, ideally, forever. He put this directly in a 1996 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders: "If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes."

  A concrete demonstration of the method came early. In 1961, Buffett revealed that 35% of his partnership's assets sat in the Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn stock had sold for just $45 per share in 1958, yet the company's investment portfolio alone was worth $65 per share, meaning the actual map business was valued at what Buffett described as "minus $20." He bought 23% of the company's outstanding shares, took a board seat, allied with other dissatisfied shareholders to control 44% of the shares, and ultimately reaped a 50% return on investment in two years.

• 4. The Berkshire Transformation

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  Buffett became a millionaire in 1962, when his partnerships had grown to eleven entities holding nearly $7.2 million, of which more than $1,025,000 belonged to Buffett himself. That same year he merged the various partnerships into the single entity Buffett Partnership, Ltd. His path into Berkshire Hathaway, a textile manufacturer, began when he purchased shares from owner Seabury Stanton at $7.60 per share.

  By 1965, when his partnerships began buying Berkshire aggressively, they paid $14.86 per share while the company's working capital stood at $19 per share, not even counting the value of fixed assets. Buffett took control at a board meeting and named Ken Chace as the new president. He would later call the textile business his worst trade. In 1966, he closed the partnership to new money. In 1967, Berkshire paid its first and only dividend of 10 cents. By 1985, the last of the mills at the core of Berkshire had been sold.

  What filled the space was an insurance and investment empire. In 1973, Berkshire began acquiring stock in the Washington Post Company, and Buffett became close friends with Katharine Graham. In 1977, Berkshire purchased the Buffalo Evening News for $32.5 million. In 1979, it began acquiring stock in ABC. Capital Cities announced a $3.5 billion purchase of ABC on the 18th of March 1985, at the time a company four times Capital Cities' own size. Buffett helped finance the deal in exchange for a 25% stake in the combined company. In 1988, he began buying Coca-Cola stock, eventually purchasing up to 7% of the company for $1.02 billion, a stake Berkshire still holds.

• 5. Crisis, Caution, and Recovery

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  In September 2008, Berkshire Hathaway acquired 10% of perpetual preferred stock in Goldman Sachs. Put options Buffett had written were running at around $6.73 billion in mark-to-market losses by late 2008. That same year, Buffett wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times under the headline "Buy American. I am." He described the financial downturn that started in 2007 as "poetic justice."

  The crisis had cost him personally. Forbes estimated his net worth at $62 billion in 2008, briefly making him the richest person in the world and displacing Bill Gates, who had held the top spot for thirteen consecutive years. In the following year, his net worth dropped to $37 billion according to Forbes, a loss of $25 billion over a twelve-month period.

  He admitted publicly to his own mistakes. Of his ConocoPhillips investment, he told Berkshire investors: "I bought a large amount of ConocoPhillips stock when oil and gas prices were near their peak. I in no way anticipated the dramatic fall in energy prices that occurred in the last half of the year... But so far I have been dead wrong." In March 2009, he said in a cable television interview that the economy had "fallen off a cliff... Not only has the economy slowed down a lot, but people have really changed their habits like I haven't seen."

  Recovery came steadily. In Q2 2014, Berkshire made $6.4 billion in net profit, the most it had ever made in a three-month period. On the 14th of August 2014, Berkshire shares hit $200,000 each for the first time, placing the company's capitalization at $328 billion.

• 6. The Giving Pledge

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  In June 2006, Buffett announced a plan to give 85% of his Berkshire holdings to five foundations in annual stock gifts beginning that July, with the largest portion going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He pledged roughly ten million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares to that foundation, in what was described at the time as the largest charitable donation in history. The pledge carried three specific conditions: Bill or Melinda Gates must remain alive and active in the foundation, the foundation must continue to qualify as a charity, and each year the foundation must give away an amount equal to the prior year's Berkshire gift plus an additional 5% of net assets.

  On the 9th of December 2010, Buffett, Bill Gates, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed what they called the Gates-Buffett Giving Pledge, a promise to donate at least half their wealth to charity and an invitation to other wealthy individuals to follow. Buffett founded The Giving Pledge formally in 2010 with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.

  He has also pledged $50 million to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and auctioned luncheons with himself to benefit the Glide Foundation, with individual bids reaching as high as $3.5 million. In November 2022, he donated $750 million in Berkshire shares to four charitable foundations run by his children. In June 2025, he donated $6 billion in Berkshire shares to five charitable foundations. As of that date, his total charitable donations exceeded $60 billion.

• 7. The Man Behind the Oracle

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  In 1949, Buffett developed a crush on a young woman whose boyfriend played the ukulele. He bought one to compete. The attempt failed, but the instrument became central to his life, and to his eventual relationship with Susan Thompson, whom he married in 1952 at Dundee Presbyterian Church. He still plays the ukulele at shareholder meetings. His affection for the instrument led him to commission two custom Dairy Queen ukuleles from maker Dave Talsma, one of which was later auctioned for charity.

  At home in Omaha, Buffett has lived since 1958 in the same five-bedroom stucco house he purchased that year. His 2006 annual salary from Berkshire Hathaway was approximately $100,000, and his 2008 total compensation was $175,000, including that same $100,000 base. He reads five newspapers every day, starting with the Omaha World Herald. He is an avid bridge player, spending around twelve hours a week at the game with Bill Gates and champion player Sharon Osberg.

  Susan Buffett died in July 2004. In 2006, on his 76th birthday, Buffett married Astrid Menks, who had lived with him since 1977 when Susan left Omaha to pursue a singing career. Christmas cards to friends during the years of separation had been signed "Warren, Susie and Astrid." Buffett described himself as agnostic after being raised as a Presbyterian.

  At Berkshire Hathaway's investor conference on the 3rd of May 2025, Buffett asked the board to appoint Greg Abel as his successor as CEO by the year's end. On the 5th of May 2025, Abel was named president and CEO effective the 1st of January 2026, with Buffett remaining as chairman.