Warren Buffett
Forbes rank #12- Net worth
- $140.8B
- Age
- 95
- Country
- United States
- Industry
- Finance & Investments
- Wealth type
- Investor
- Background
- Non-STEM
Documented facts
Verifiable against the sources belowWealth and source
Berkshire Hathaway equity
- Self-made status
- self-made
- Figure as of
- 22 August 2026
Education
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Business
None (two years, transferred) · Left without completing · 1949
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Business Administration
BS · Completed · 1951
Columbia Business School
Economics
MS · Completed · 1951
Career
- 1951Studied under Benjamin Graham at Columbia.
- 1954–1956Securities analyst at Graham-Newman Corp.
- 1956Formed Buffett Partnership Ltd.
- 1965Took control of Berkshire Hathaway, then a textile firm.
- 1965–Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
- 2010Co-founded the Giving Pledge with Bill and Melinda Gates.
Interpretation
Our reading of public evidence — not private psychological factSkill stack
A categorisation of a documented career, not a measured assessment. Hover any skill for its definition.
Work philosophy
Publicly describes spending most of his working day reading annual reports and filings, and keeping an unusually empty calendar — a documented preference for thinking time over meeting volume.
Mental models
Compounding
The annual letters measure performance as change in book value per share compounded over decades, and repeatedly argue that retained earnings reinvested at good returns are the engine of the result.
Capital allocation
The letters describe the chairman's job explicitly as deciding where each incremental dollar goes — operating businesses, marketable securities, or buybacks.
Long-term thinking
Stated preferred holding period of 'forever' for wholly owned businesses, and a documented refusal to manage to quarterly earnings.
Risk management
Persistent insistence on a margin of safety, an aversion to leverage, and holding large cash reserves specifically to survive periods when others cannot.
Each model is listed only where a specific piece of public evidence supports it. The evidence line is what you should judge — the label is just an index into it.
Public business philosophy
Value investing learned from Benjamin Graham: buy businesses rather than tickers, insist on a margin of safety, stay inside a circle of competence, and run subsidiaries with extreme decentralisation.
Public ideology
Has publicly argued that wealthy Americans are under-taxed relative to their employees (the basis of the proposed 'Buffett Rule'), and co-founded the Giving Pledge in 2010, committing to give away the large majority of his wealth.
Sources
Grouped by the field each source supports.
net worth · rank
education · age · career timeline · ideology notes
public philosophy · mental models · work ethic notes
Expensive mistakes
Documented failures, kept to the same standard as everything else: what happened is cited, what it teaches is labelled as our reading.
Buying Berkshire Hathaway itself
1964What happened
Buffett bought into a failing textile company out of irritation. Its CEO had verbally agreed to tender his shares at $11.50, then sent an offer at $11.375. Buffett responded by buying control and firing him — then spent two decades tied to a dying textile business.
Buffett's own estimate: roughly $200bn in forgone value
Our reading
The most expensive decision of a famously rational career was made in a moment of spite over an eighth of a point. Worth sitting with before assuming that the people in this dataset optimise coldly: the documented failure mode is emotional, and it cost more than any analytical error he has admitted to.
Full context and sources on the mistakes page.
Most similar in this dataset
Ranked by shared wealth type and industry, then by overlap in skills and mental models.
Similarity is computed from the fields in this dataset only. Two people can share every field here and have had completely different starting conditions.