Warren Buffett

Warren Edward Buffett was born on August 30, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of three children and the only son of Leila Stahl Buffett and Howard Buffett, a stockbroker who later served four terms in the United States House of Representatives ^[1]. The family lived through the Great Depression in his earliest years, and the anxieties of that period left a lasting mark on his attitude toward money and security. Omaha itself remained his anchor: he was born there, built his career there, and never moved his professional base away from the city.

The boy showed an unusual head for numbers and commerce early. He sold chewing gum, bottles of Coca-Cola, and magazines door to door, delivered newspapers for the Washington Post, and filed his first income tax return at fourteen, claiming a deduction for his bicycle ^[1]. At eleven he bought his first shares of stock, three shares of Cities Service preferred, an episode he later described as an early lesson in patience after he sold too soon and watched the price climb ^[2]. While his father served in Congress, the family lived in Washington, D.C., where Warren attended Woodrow Wilson High School and ran a pinball machine business with a friend, placing machines in local barbershops.

He enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, transferred to the University of Nebraska, and graduated in 1950. Rejected by Harvard Business School, he applied to Columbia University after learning that Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor, taught there ^[2]. That decision proved to be one of the most consequential of his life.

At Columbia Business School, Buffett studied under Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, and earned a master's degree in economics in 1951 ^[2]. Graham's central idea, that a share of stock represents a fractional ownership stake in a real business and should be bought only at a discount to its underlying worth, became the foundation of everything Buffett later did. After graduation he worked briefly as a salesman at his father's brokerage in Omaha, then joined Graham's investment firm, Graham-Newman Corporation, in New York in 1954 ^[1].

When Graham retired and closed the partnership in 1956, Buffett returned to Omaha and, at twenty five, started Buffett Partnership Ltd. with money from family and friends ^[3]. Over the following thirteen years the partnership compounded capital at rates that far outpaced the broader market, and Buffett became a millionaire by the early 1960s. During this period he began buying shares of a struggling New England textile manufacturer called Berkshire Hathaway, initially as a classic Graham-style bargain. He took control of the company in 1965, a purchase he later called a mistake as a textile investment but the vehicle for everything that followed ^[3].

Two influences reshaped his approach in these years. The first was Charlie Munger, an Omaha-born lawyer he met in 1959 who became his closest business partner and eventually vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Munger pushed Buffett away from buying mediocre companies at deep discounts and toward buying excellent businesses at reasonable prices ^[4]. The second was the accumulating evidence of his own results: by 1969 Buffett wound down the partnership, telling investors he could no longer find bargains in an overheated market, and concentrated on Berkshire.

Under Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway stopped being a textile company and became a holding company for a growing collection of businesses. Insurance was the engine. The 1967 purchase of National Indemnity gave Berkshire access to insurance float, the premiums held before claims are paid, which Buffett deployed into stocks and whole companies ^[3]. Later acquisitions included GEICO, the auto insurer he had first studied as a student because Graham chaired its board, which Berkshire bought outright in 1996 ^[1].

The roster of Berkshire holdings grew to include See's Candies, the Buffalo News, Nebraska Furniture Mart, Dairy Queen, the railroad BNSF, and large minority stakes in companies such as Coca-Cola, American Express, and later Apple ^[5]. Buffett's method was distinctive for its restraint: he avoided businesses he did not understand, famously sidestepping most technology stocks during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, a stance that drew criticism at the time and vindication when the bubble burst ^[5]. The original textile operation was finally shut down in 1985.

Berkshire's share price told the story. A single Class A share, never split, rose from the teens when Buffett began buying in the 1960s to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the company grew into one of the largest in America by market value ^[3]. Buffett kept the head office in Omaha with a famously tiny staff, drew a salary of 100,000 dollars a year for decades, and ran the sprawling conglomerate with a degree of decentralization unusual for its size, leaving acquired managers to run their own businesses ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Warren Buffett behind the headlines finds a record with few parallels in financial history. Berkshire Hathaway's compounded growth in per-share value over more than half a century vastly exceeded the return of the S&P 500 index over the same span, a comparison Buffett himself published in the front of every annual report ^[3]. Forbes repeatedly ranked him among the wealthiest people on earth, and in 2008 the magazine listed him as the richest person in the world ^[6].

Among Warren Buffett achievements, his role during the 2008 financial crisis stands out. As markets seized up, Berkshire invested five billion dollars in Goldman Sachs and three billion in General Electric on favorable terms, moves widely read as votes of confidence that helped steady sentiment ^[5]. He also wrote a much-cited opinion piece in the New York Times in October 2008 urging Americans to buy stocks while others were fearful ^[5].

His annual letters to Berkshire shareholders, written in plain language and laced with self-deprecating humor, became required reading far beyond Wall Street, and the company's annual meeting in Omaha grew into an event drawing tens of thousands of attendees, sometimes called Woodstock for Capitalists ^[4]. In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded Buffett the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States ^[7]. He also lent his name to public policy debates, most notably the so-called Buffett Rule, a proposal inspired by his observation that he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary ^[7].

Buffett married Susan Thompson in 1952, and the couple had three children: Susie, Howard, and Peter ^[1]. The marriage took an unconventional turn in 1977 when Susan moved to San Francisco to pursue a singing career, though the two never divorced and remained close until her death in 2004. With Susan's knowledge, Astrid Menks became Buffett's companion in Omaha, and he married her in 2006 on his seventy sixth birthday ^[1].

His personal habits became part of his public legend, and most of the familiar Warren Buffett facts hold up: he continued to live in the Omaha house he bought in 1958 for 31,500 dollars, drove himself to work, and professed a lifelong fondness for Cherry Coke, hamburgers, and See's peanut brittle ^[6]. He plays bridge avidly, often online and sometimes with his friend Bill Gates, and has said he spends most of his working day reading ^[4].

Buffett's friendship with Gates, which began at a 1991 meeting both men initially resisted attending, grew into one of the defining relationships of his later life, joining the two men in philanthropy as well as bridge ^[6]. Despite his father's Republican politics, Buffett has generally supported Democratic candidates and spoken publicly in favor of higher taxes on the very wealthy ^[7].

In June 2006 Buffett announced that he would give away the great bulk of his fortune, pledging roughly 85 percent of his Berkshire stock to five foundations, with the largest share going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ^[8]. The gift, valued at the time at more than 30 billion dollars, was among the largest charitable commitments ever made. In 2010 he joined Gates in launching the Giving Pledge, a campaign inviting billionaires to commit at least half their wealth to philanthropy ^[8].

He kept working past ages when most executives had long retired. In 2012 he disclosed a diagnosis of early stage prostate cancer, completed radiation treatment, and returned to full duties ^[5]. Questions about succession at Berkshire persisted for years until 2021, when Munger let slip and Buffett confirmed that Greg Abel, the vice chairman overseeing Berkshire's non-insurance operations, would eventually take over as chief executive ^[5]. Munger's death in November 2023, a month before his hundredth birthday, ended a partnership of more than six decades.

In May 2025, at the annual meeting in Omaha, Buffett announced that he would ask the board to make Abel chief executive at the end of the year, closing out six decades at the helm while indicating he would remain involved with the company he built ^[5]. By then his cumulative charitable giving had exceeded 50 billion dollars, even as continued growth in Berkshire's stock kept him among the world's richest people ^[8].

Buffett's influence runs wider than his balance sheet. He translated Benjamin Graham's academic framework into a working philosophy that generations of investors adopted: treat stocks as businesses, insist on a margin of safety, stay within a circle of competence, and let compounding do the heavy lifting ^[2]. Business schools teach his shareholder letters, and phrases he popularized, such as being fearful when others are greedy, entered the common vocabulary of finance ^[4].

His example also changed expectations of the very rich. The 2006 pledge to the Gates Foundation and the Giving Pledge that followed set a template for large scale giving during a donor's lifetime rather than through posthumous bequests, and hundreds of wealthy signatories followed ^[8]. At the same time, his criticism of a tax code that favored investment income over wages gave political weight to debates about inequality that continue today ^[7].

Perhaps the most unusual part of his legacy is tonal. In an industry associated with jargon and short horizons, Buffett argued for candor, simplicity, and decades-long patience, and he did it from a modest office in Omaha rather than a Manhattan tower. Berkshire Hathaway itself, a conglomerate built on trust in managers and indifference to fashion, remains a living argument for that approach, and its eventual performance under his successors will be the final test of whether the system he built can outlast the man ^[3].