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Warren Buffett

Berkshire Hathaway · 1930–present
Born August 30, 1930

Investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett (born 1930 in Omaha) studied under Benjamin Graham at Columbia, founded Buffett Partnership Ltd. in 1956, and from December 1962 bought into Berkshire at $7.50 a share — a dying textile maker he took control of in May 1965 and later called his worst investment. He turned its cash into insurance float (National Indemnity, 1967), then into whole businesses: See’s Candies for $25 million in 1972, The Washington Post in 1973, $1.02 billion of Coca-Cola from 1988, all of GEICO in 1996, BNSF for $34 billion in 2009. Per-share market value compounded 19.9% a year from 1965 to 2024. He handed the CEO job to Greg Abel on 1 January 2026.

Covered 8× on Founders ↓
Career highlights
  1. 1930Born 30 August in Omaha, Nebraska, son of Howard Buffett, a stockbroker who later served four terms in Congress.
  2. 1945As a teenager delivering The Washington Post, earned more than $175 a month — more than his teachers — and put $25 with a friend into a used pinball machine placed in an Omaha barber shop; the machines were sold in 1947 for $1,200.
  3. 1950Rejected by Harvard Business School, enrolled at Columbia specifically because Benjamin Graham taught there, taking an M.S. in economics in 1951.
  4. 1951After a Saturday conversation with Lorimer Davidson at GEICO’s Washington headquarters, put 65% of his $9,800 net worth into the stock — his first big exception to Graham-style cigar-butt investing.
  5. 1956Founded Buffett Partnership Ltd. in Omaha at 25, having spent two years as an analyst at Graham-Newman in New York; nearly all his net worth sat inside it.
  6. 1965Took control of Berkshire Hathaway at an early-May board meeting with 392,633 of 1,017,547 shares, having bought in from December 1962 at $7.50 and then refused Seabury Stanton’s $11.375 tender — an eighth of a point below the $11.50 they had agreed. “I became the dog who caught the car.”
  7. 1967Had Berkshire pay $8.6 million for National Indemnity, a small Omaha insurer — the source of the float that funded everything after it, and, he later argued, his most costly mistake for having bought it inside Berkshire rather than for his partners.
  8. 1972Blue Chip Stamps bought See’s Candies for $25 million after he balked at the family’s $30 million asking price; See’s was earning about $4 million pre-tax on $8 million of net tangible assets and has since returned $1.9 billion on $40 million of added investment.
  9. 1973Bought 1,727,765 shares of The Washington Post Company for a total cost of $9.7 million, a position Berkshire still held four decades later.
  10. 1985Closed Berkshire’s textile operation in July, twenty years after taking control — “stubbornness – stupidity? – has its limits.”
  11. 1988Bought 14,172,500 shares of Coca-Cola for $592.5 million and kept buying until 1994, ending with 93,400,000 shares at a cost of $1.024 billion; the same letter contains his longest attack on efficient-market theory.
  12. 1991Stepped in as interim chairman of Salomon Brothers in August, four years after putting $700 million of Berkshire’s money into its preferred stock, when trader Paul Mozer’s false Treasury-auction bids forced out John Gutfreund and nearly killed the firm.
  13. 1996Bought the rest of GEICO for $2.3 billion, 45 years after first owning the stock, and in June issued “An Owner’s Manual,” restating the 13 owner-related business principles he had first set down in 1983.
  14. 2006On 26 June irrevocably pledged 10 million Berkshire B shares to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — 5% of the remaining balance each July, the first tranche alone lifting the foundation’s annual giving by about $1.5 billion.
  15. 2009Agreed on 3 November to buy the 77.4% of Burlington Northern Santa Fe he did not already own at $100 a share — a $34 billion investment inside a deal valued at $44 billion including debt, and “an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States.”
  16. 2025Announced at the 3 May annual meeting that he would ask the board to make Greg Abel — designated his successor back in 2021 — chief executive from 1 January 2026; the board voted unanimously the next day. In a Thanksgiving message on 10 November he wrote that he was “going quiet … Sort of.”
  17. 2026Stepped down as CEO on 1 January after 60 years, remaining chairman; Abel wrote the 2025 shareholder letter, signing it on 28 February 2026. Per-share market value had compounded 19.9% a year against the S&P 500’s 10.4% since 1965.
Lessons for founders
An Owner’s Manual
  1. Although our form is corporate, our attitude is partnership.Buffett and Munger think of shareholders as owner-partners and themselves as managing partners, not as custodians of a piece of paper whose price wiggles daily — a frame he says most long-term Berkshire holders have genuinely adopted.
  2. Most of our directors have a significant portion of their net worth invested in the company — we eat our own cooking.Buffett held more than 98% of his own net worth in Berkshire stock. The promise to shareholders is that their financial fortunes move in lockstep with his, mistakes included.
  3. Our long-term economic goal is to maximize Berkshire’s average annual rate of gain in intrinsic business value on a per-share basis.Berkshire measures itself by per-share progress rather than sheer size, while expecting that growth rate to keep slowing as its capital base enlarges.
  4. Our preference would be to reach our goal by directly owning a diversified group of businesses that generate cash and consistently earn above-average returns on capital.Failing that, the fallback is owning pieces of similar businesses through the insurance subsidiaries’ stock purchases — and a falling market helps both routes, which is why Buffett says Berkshire should neither panic nor mourn when it plummets.
  5. Consolidated reported earnings may reveal relatively little about our true economic performance, so we will also report to you the earnings of each major business we control.Buffett and Munger say they largely ignore the consolidated figure themselves and try to give shareholders the same picture of each business, including unconventional measures like insurance float, that they use to run it.
  6. Accounting consequences do not influence our operating or capital-allocation decisions.Given similar cost, Berkshire prefers $2 of earnings unreportable under standard accounting to $1 that is reportable — a preference for real look-through earnings over whatever GAAP happens to record.
  7. We use debt sparingly, and will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.Berkshire instead leans on two low-cost sources of leverage, deferred taxes and insurance float, which carry no covenants or due dates — debt’s benefit without its risk.
  8. A managerial ‘wish list’ will not be filled at shareholder expense.Berkshire will not diversify by buying whole businesses at control prices that ignore the economic cost to shareholders; the test for any acquisition is whether it raises per-share intrinsic value.
  9. We feel noble intentions should be checked periodically against results.The self-imposed test is whether every dollar of earnings retained has produced at least a dollar of market value, checked on a rolling five-year basis — a formulation Buffett later said he had written imprecisely, and corrected after a shareholder’s question at the 2009 annual meeting.
  10. We will issue common stock only when we receive as much in business value as we give.The rule covers every form of issuance, not just public offerings; Buffett points to the 1996 Class B offering, priced at fair value rather than at a discount, as the standard applied in practice.
  11. Regardless of price, we have no interest at all in selling any good businesses that Berkshire owns.Berkshire also resists dumping sub-par businesses as long as they generate some cash and their managers and labor relations are sound. Buffett calls the alternative ‘gin rummy’ management — discarding the weakest holding at every turn — and says he would rather accept worse overall results than practice it.
  12. We will be candid in our reporting to you, emphasizing the pluses and minuses important in appraising business value.The guideline is to tell shareholders what Buffett and Munger would want to know if the positions were reversed — no ‘big bath’ write-offs, no smoothing of results, and no earnings guidance that gives one shareholder an edge over another.
  13. Despite our policy of candor, we will discuss our activities in marketable securities only to the extent legally required.Good investment ideas are scarce and easily copied, so Berkshire will not discuss specific stocks — including ones it has sold or is rumored to be buying — while still discussing its broader investment philosophy openly.
On the Founders podcast8×
  1. #88Shareholder Letters: All of Them
  2. #100The Snowball
  3. #101The Tao of Warren Buffett
  4. #182The Making of an American Capitalist
  5. #202A Few Lessons from Warren Buffett
  6. #227The Essays of Warren Buffett
  7. #286Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger
  8. #380Buffett and Munger in Their Own Words
Read about them7
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Alice Schroeder
The authorised biography, written with several years of access to Buffett, his files, and his family. Unusually candid about the personal cost of the compounding — his first marriage, his children, and the household arrangement after Susan Buffett moved to San Francisco. source ↗
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
Roger Lowenstein
The 1995 unauthorised biography by a Wall Street Journal reporter, and still the tightest narrative of the investing career itself — the partnership years, the Berkshire takeover, and the Salomon rescue. source ↗
Of Permanent Value: The Story of Warren Buffett
Andrew Kilpatrick
A vast, endlessly revised compendium assembled by an Alabama journalist over decades — closer to an encyclopedia of Berkshire than a narrative, and the place where obscure deals and subsidiary histories are actually recorded. source ↗
Buffett’s Bites: The Essential Investor’s Guide to Warren Buffett’s Shareholder Letters
L. J. Rittenhouse
A short guide to reading the letters as documents — what the candour, the ordering, and the admissions of error actually signal. Buffett recommended Rittenhouse’s other book, Investing Between the Lines, from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2012. source ↗
The Warren Buffett Way
Robert G. Hagstrom
The book that turned the method into a teachable checklist — business, management, financial, and value tenets — reconstructed from the letters and the public filings rather than from access to Buffett. source ↗
Tap Dancing to Work: Warren Buffett on Practically Everything, 1966–2012
Carol J. Loomis
Forty-six years of Fortune coverage, including pieces Buffett wrote himself, assembled by the journalist who has edited his shareholder letter since 1977. He co-signed 500 copies for the 2013 annual meeting. source ↗
University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting
Daniel Pecaut and Corey Wrenn
Two Iowa investors attended every Berkshire annual meeting from 1986 and kept notes. The result is the only continuous record of what Buffett and Munger said from the stage across three decades, year by year. source ↗
In their own words1
The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
Warren E. Buffett; selected by Lawrence A. Cunningham
The shareholder letters cut loose from their years and rearranged by subject — governance, acquisitions, accounting, valuation. Buffett cooperated with the project, which makes it the closest thing to a book he has written. source ↗
Essays14view more →
  1. 19771977 Chairman’s LetterThe earliest letter in Berkshire’s own archive. Contains the four tests still quoted today: a business we can understand, with favourable long-term prospects, run by honest and competent people, available at a very attractive price.
  2. 19831983 Chairman’s LetterSets down the 13 owner-related business principles that became the Owner’s Manual, and appends “Goodwill and its Amortization,” which uses See’s Candies to separate economic goodwill from the accounting kind.
  3. 19851985 Chairman’s Letter“Shutdown of Textile Business” — the postmortem on the mill he bought control of twenty years earlier, opened by Munger’s rule that you learn more from studying errors than successes.
  4. 19871987 Chairman’s LetterIntroduces Ben Graham’s Mr. Market to a general audience — “It is his pocketbook, not his wisdom, that you will find useful” — and discloses the $700 million Salomon preferred that would define 1991.
  5. 19881988 Chairman’s LetterFirst disclosure of the Coca-Cola position — 14,172,500 shares at a cost of $592.5 million — alongside his longest attack on efficient-market theory: observing correctly that the market was frequently efficient, academics concluded incorrectly that it was always efficient.
  6. 19891989 Chairman’s Letter“Mistakes of the First Twenty-five Years (A Condensed Version).” The public recantation of cigar-butt investing and the source of the most-quoted sentence he ever wrote about business quality versus price.
  7. 20042004 Chairman’s LetterWhere he describes reading Graham at 19 — “the scales fell from my eyes” — and traces the fifteen-year record of the Big Four holdings bought between May 1988 and October 2003.
  8. 20082008 Chairman’s LetterThe financial-crisis letter. Its Derivatives section opens “Derivatives are dangerous” and describes untangling the 23,218 contracts with 884 counterparties that came with General Re.
  9. 20102010 Chairman’s LetterReprints his 26 July 2010 memo to Berkshire’s managers: lose money, even a lot of it, but never a shred of reputation — and never accept “everybody else is doing it” as a reason.
  10. 20122012 Chairman’s LetterThe dividend-policy essay, argued through Chapter 7 of Phil Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, plus his fullest set of book recommendations in any single letter.
  11. 20132013 Chairman’s Letter“Some Thoughts About Investing” — the Nebraska farm and the New York retail property used to explain what an investment is, closing with what The Intelligent Investor did to him in 1949.
  12. 20142014 Chairman’s LetterThe Golden Anniversary letter. “Berkshire – Past, Present and Future” tells the Seabury Stanton eighth-of-a-point story in his own words, and Munger’s separate fifty-year assessment follows it; neither man changed a word after reading the other.
  13. 20232023 Chairman’s LetterOpens with “Charlie Munger – The Architect of Berkshire Hathaway,” written weeks after Munger died on 28 November, 33 days short of his hundredth birthday.
  14. 20242024 Chairman’s LetterHis last annual letter as chief executive. Opens with “Mistakes – Yes, We Make Them at Berkshire” and Tom Murphy’s rule for discussing subsidiaries: praise by name, criticize by category.
What they recommend20
The Intelligent Investor
Benjamin Graham
The book that reorganised his thinking at 19"Of all the investments I ever made, buying Ben’s book was the best (except for my purchase of two marriage licenses)." source ↗
Security Analysis
Benjamin Graham and David Dodd
Ranked among the three best books ever written for the serious investorIn the 2012 letter he places Fisher’s Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits “behind only The Intelligent Investor and the 1940 edition of Security Analysis in the all-time-best list for the serious investor.” He later wrote the foreword to the sixth edition. source ↗
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings
Philip A. Fisher
Named the third-best book for the serious investor"Phil Fisher put it wonderfully 54 years ago in Chapter 7 of his Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, a book that ranks behind only The Intelligent Investor and the 1940 edition of Security Analysis in the all-time-best list for the serious investor." source ↗
Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?
Fred Schwed Jr.
Added to the annual-meeting bookstall in 2006 and recommended again in 2014"The funniest book ever written about investing, it lightly delivers many truly important messages on the subject." source ↗
Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
Charles T. Munger (ed. Peter D. Kaufman)
Wrote the foreword; the perennial bestseller at Berkshire’s annual meeting"What Ben had recommended, Charlie demanded." source ↗
The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
William N. Thorndike Jr.
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2012"The Outsiders, by William Thorndike, Jr., is an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation." source ↗
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
John C. Bogle
The book he tells ordinary investors to read instead of hiring an adviser"Rather than listen to their siren songs, investors – large and small – should instead read Jack Bogle’s The Little Book of Common Sense Investing." source ↗
The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation
John C. Bogle
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2012"I also recommend The Clash of the Cultures by Jack Bogle and Laura Rittenhouse’s Investing Between the Lines." source ↗
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Phil Knight
Named his book of the year in the 2016 letter"The best book I read last year was Shoe Dog, by Nike’s Phil Knight. Phil is a very wise, intelligent and competitive fellow who is also a gifted storyteller." source ↗
Jack: Straight from the Gut
Jack Welch with John A. Byrne
Read with Munger in autumn 2001 and used as a yardstick for a Berkshire CEO"Last fall, Charlie and I read Jack Welch’s terrific book, Jack, Straight from the Gut (get a copy!)." source ↗
Take on the Street: What Wall Street and Corporate America Don’t Want You to Know
Arthur Levitt with Paula Dwyer
Cited as the record of the 1990s fight over expensing stock options"The details of this sordid affair are related in Levitt’s excellent book, Take on the Street." source ↗
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
Peter Bevelin
Added to the Berkshire annual-meeting bookstall in 2006Written by a long-time Swedish Berkshire shareholder; a synthesis of the psychology-of-misjudgment material Munger has spent decades assembling. source ↗
Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street
John Brooks
Recommended it to Bill Gates, who called it “the best business book I’ve ever read”A 1969 collection of New Yorker pieces. The cited article records only that Gates read it on Buffett’s recommendation and said so in a July 2014 Wall Street Journal essay; the widely repeated detail that Buffett posted Gates his own copy is not stated there, and every account of it runs through gatesnotes, Fortune, the WSJ or CNBC, all of which 403 when fetched. A full-text search of all 48 shareholder letters confirms Buffett has never named the book in one, so the recommendation survives only at second hand. source ↗
MiTek: A Global Success Story, 1981-2011
Jim Healy
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2011"I recommend MiTek, an informative history of one of our very successful subsidiaries. You'll learn how my interest in the company was originally piqued by my receiving in the mail a hunk of ugly metal whose purpose I couldn't fathom." source ↗
A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett
Peter Bevelin
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2011"I think you'll also like a short book that Peter Bevelin has put together explaining Berkshire's investment and operating principles. It sums up what Charlie and I have been saying over the years in annual reports and at annual meetings." source ↗
Investing Between the Lines: How to Make Smarter Investment Decisions by Decoding CEO Communications
L. J. Rittenhouse
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2012"I also recommend The Clash of the Cultures by Jack Bogle and Laura Rittenhouse's Investing Between the Lines." source ↗
Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders
Max Olson (ed.)
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2013"One is Max Olson's compilation of Berkshire letters going back to 1965. The book includes an index that I find particularly useful, specifying page numbers for individuals, companies and subject matter." source ↗
40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World
Howard G. Buffett and Howard W. Buffett
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2013"I also recommend Forty Chances by my son, Howard. You'll enjoy it." source ↗
Limping On Water
Phil Beuth
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2015"My friend, Phil Beuth, has written Limping on Water, an autobiography that chronicles his life at Capital Cities Communications and tells you a lot about its leaders, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke. These two were the best managerial duo – both in what they accomplished and how they did it – that Charlie and I ever witnessed." source ↗
Warren Buffett's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor
Jeremy C. Miller
Recommended from the annual-meeting bookstall in 2015"Finally, Jeremy Miller has written Warren Buffett's Ground Rules, a book that will debut at the annual meeting. Mr. Miller has done a superb job of researching and dissecting the operation of Buffett Partnership Ltd. and of explaining how Berkshire's culture has evolved from its BPL origin." source ↗
Similar taste

Founders who share the most book recommendations with Warren:

Sources17
An archive of what founders read, and what was written about them.