What is Warren Buffett's net worth?
Warren Buffett is an American investor and philanthropist who has a net worth of $138 billion. Warren Buffett is widely considered the greatest investor of the 20th century. If you bought $1,000 worth of Warren's holding company Berkshire Hathaway in 1965, today, your shares would be worth over $25 million, not including dividends issued by the companies it owns (Berkshire itself does not pay a dividend).
Warren's wealth comes from his ownership stake in the holding company Berkshire Hathaway. Warren the Berkshire's largest individual shareholder. He controls roughly 31% of the company's voting interest and 15.6% of Berkshire's equity. Outside of Berkshire, Warren owns 1% of US Bancorp.
Buffett's interest in the stock market dates back to childhood. On a trip to New York City at the age of ten, he made a point to visit the New York Stock Exchange in the way others might visit the Statue of Liberty. It was a must-see attraction for the young Buffett. At the age of 11, he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself. Today, his investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway owns hundreds of companies outright, has enormous investments in hundreds of other companies, and has a market cap of roughly $700 billion. Around 99% of Buffett's net worth was made after he turned 50 years old.
Warren Buffett has pledged to give away 99% of his net worth to charity before he dies. A large portion of that money will go to Bill Gates' foundation. Warren and Bill are the co-founders of The Giving Pledge, an effort to inspire other billionaires to pledge at least 50% of their net worth to charity in their lifetimes as well.
(Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Fortune/Time Inc)
Early Life
Warren Buffett was born on August 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska. He is the second of three children and the only son of Leila and Congressman Howard Buffett. Buffett began his education at Rose Hill Elementary School.
Buffett developed his interest in business and investing at a young age. When he was 7, he was inspired by a book he borrowed from the library called "One Thousand Ways to Make $1000."
Buffett started making his mark and his fortune when he was a pre-teen. When he was ten years old, he had lunch with someone from the New York Stock Exchange and began setting his goals for his entire life. After that lunch, young Buffett knew that he wanted his life to revolve around money. A year later, when he was 11 years old, he bought his first stock. He had a paper route and used the money from that to buy some Oklahoma farmland. By the time he was a sophomore in high school, he was running a successful pinball machine business and had a net worth of roughly $6,000 – that's equivalent to $60,000 today.
In 1942, his father was elected to the first of four terms in the United States Congress. After moving with his family to Washington, D.C., Warren attended Alice Deal Junior High School and graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1947. His senior yearbook picture reads:
"likes math; a future stockbroker."
College
In 1947, Buffett enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Warren studied there for two years and joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. After two years, Warren stopped seeing a purpose for attending. He already knew exactly what he wanted to do:
a) Live in Omaha
b) Invest in stocks.
His parents stepped in and forced him to ship back to Pennsylvania. But Warren's love of his hometown would prevail, and after two years, he transferred to the University of Nebraska to finish his bachelor's degree. He graduated at the age of 19 with a Bachelor of Science degree in business administration. He then enrolled at Columbia Business School to study under his idols, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. He earned his Master of Science in economics in 1951.
Buffett Partnership Ltd
After graduating from Columbia, he went to work as an investment salesman for his family's company, Buffett-Falk & Co. He also taught a course on "Investment Principles" at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and purchased a gas station. The gas station failed, but his business acumen caught the attention of Benjamin Graham, a well-respected businessman and investor and one of Buffet's former professors. Buffett left Buffet-Falk & Co. to work as a securities analyst for the Graham-Newman Corp. His starting salary was $12,000 a year (approximately $106,000 inflation-adjusted).
While Buffett learned a great deal during his four years of working with Graham, he also realized he was more willing to take investment risks than his boss. When Graham retired and shuttered the business, Buffett took the nearly $174,000 (approx. $1.47 million today) he had saved while working for Graham-Newman and started Buffett Partnership Ltd.
Over the course of the next three years, he grew his business from three partnerships to six. That number almost doubled over the course of the next two years, and by 1962, he was a millionaire.
Geico Investment
In April 1952, Buffett made his first big bet on what was then a struggling and obscure insurance company called Government Employees Insurance Company. Better known today as GEICO. The company was not a bargain—it was trading above the value of its assets. Buffett analyzed the business and saw how fast it was growing. He felt confident that he'd be able to predict what the insurance company would be worth in a few years. He took three-quarters of the money he'd patiently and meticulously acquired up to that point and took over GEICO. Today, Berkshire owns 100% of Geico.
Berkshire Hathaway
By 1960, Buffett had made money so rapidly and impressively that his name was being whispered between those in the know like a secret. He was already gaining a reputation for being a wizard with money. In 1962, Warren began buying shares in textile manufacturer Berkshire Hathaway at $7.60 per share. In 1965, Buffett began purchasing Berkshire aggressively, paying $14.86 per share while the company had working capital of $19 per share. By 1970, he owned the majority of the company and appointed himself Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a position he holds to this day.
Through Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett began an aggressive series of investments, takeovers, and restructuring moves that saw his assets increase exponentially. He also solidified his reputation as an investor to watch and follow. It seemed that everything he touched turned to gold. He had a knack for purchasing stock in wildly undervalued companies and riding the increase in their fortunes to ever-larger profits.
By the early 1980s, Warren Buffett's net worth worth $620 million. That's the same as around $2 billion today. That wealth and success, seemingly out of nowhere, earned Warren the nickname the "Oracle of Omaha."
By 1990, he was a billionaire, with shares of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, worth $7,175 each.
Warren Buffett is famous for investing in products he actually uses. For example, he owns Fruit of the Loom because he enjoys their shirts and underwear.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Personal Life
In 1949, Buffett had a crush on a young woman named Susan Thompson, whose boyfriend had a ukulele. In an attempt to compete, he bought his own ukulele and has been playing it ever since. Buffett and Thompson married in 1952. They had three children: Susie, Howard, and Peter. The couple began living separately in 1977 when Susan moved to San Francisco to pursue a singing career but remained married until her death in July 2004.
In 2006, on his 76th birthday, Buffett married his longtime companion, Astrid Menks, who was then 60 years old—she had lived with him since his wife moved to San Francisco. In fact, Susan arranged for the two to meet before she left Omaha. All three were close, and Christmas cards to friends were signed: "Warren, Susie, and Astrid."
He is a dedicated, lifelong follower of University of Nebraska football and attends as many games as his schedule permits.
Warren Buffet doesn't have a computer on his desk. He also uses a flip phone rather than an iPhone or Android. He's also only sent one email in his entire life–to Microsoft's Jeff Raikes.
Buffett is a legendarily unhealthy eater and consumes a ton of Coca-Cola every single day. He has said: "If I eat 2,700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I drink at least five 12-ounce servings. I do it every day." Buffett has also been known to eat ice cream for breakfast.
In 2010, together with Bill and Melinda Gates, he formed The Giving Pledge, which asks the world's wealthiest people to dedicate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. As of 2023, Buffett has donated over $50 billion to charities.
Wealth Details & History
Buffett's fortune comes thanks to his 18% ownership interest in Berkshire Hathaway. Between 1965 and 2016, the share price of Berkshire increased on average 20.8%. Buffett owns nearly 300,000 Class A shares and almost 150,000 Class B shares of the company. He also owns more than two million shares of both Wells Fargo and Seritage Growth Properties, nearly 900,000 shares of U.S. Bancorp, and 9,000 more shares of IBM. Even with all of those holdings, his Berkshire Hathaway shares have been calculated to represent over 98 percent of his net worth. He also donates around five percent of that stock to charity each summer.
At age 21, Buffett had $20,000 ($199,175.93 today). He made his first million ($8.1 million today) when he was 30 years old. Five years later, at 35, Buffett had a net worth of $7 million ($53.3 million today). At 39, he had $25 million. At 47, he was worth $67 million. At 56, Buffett was a billionaire, worth $1.4 billion. And then his wealth really began to accumulate. By the time he was 66, Buffett was worth $17 billion. At 72, that had jumped to more than $36 billion. In 2016, Buffett added $12 billion to his already substantial fortune.
Real Estate
In 1958, Warren and Susan Buffett bought a lovely but modest five-bedroom house in Omaha for $31,500 (the same as around $330,000 today). He still lives in this same house to this day. It is now worth around $1.2 million.
