From what I recall of the last analysis on this subject, I don't think he has 'a few billion' in his non-Berkshire holdings. The non-Berkshire holdings are basically the money he has accumulated since personally buying Berkshire Hathaway, with his fairly modest salary. He has often described that he could (and does) beat Berkshire's ROI as a small investor, which is why his non-Berkshire holdings are in the millions.

His billions, from where his net worth for Fortune are calculated, is the 30+% ownership of Berkshire Hathaway (market cap today, 180B). The rest is almost a rounding error -- except that's where all of his lifestyle expenses come from, beyond his $100K salary and misc. payments, as he doesn't sell (as far as I know) any of his BH and it does not yield a dividend.

About the dividends (http://www.focusinvestor.com/brkfaq.htm#Q7):

"We feel noble intentions should be checked periodically against results. We test the wisdom of retaining earnings by assessing whether retention, over time, delivers shareholders at least $1 of market value for each $1 retained. To date, this test has been met. We will continue to apply it on a five-year rolling basis. As our net worth grows, it is more difficult to use retained earnings wisely." Source: Berkshire Hathaway's Owner's Manual

Mr. Buffett:: "We will either pay large dividends or none at all if we can't obtain more money through re-investment (of those funds). There is no logic to regularly paying out 10% or 20% of earnings as dividends every year."

Charles Munger: "If you went to the leading schools, they wouldn't teach dividend policy this way." Source: My notes from the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

Keep meaning to make it to an annual meeting. I'm not sure if this year's circus will be better or worse.

Thank you for elaborating on the dividend comment. I certainly was not trying to imply that it was a negative. It just emphasizes that while Mr. Buffett may have as much money as anyone in the world, he does not have it in a private or liquid form outside of his role at Berkshire Hathaway. Like many growth of company-based Billionares (Gates, Bezos, etc), there is a great deal of transparency (an annual report!) in investment philosophy. Contrast with someone like Stephen Schwarzman.

Invest what you can afford to lose.

Another bit of advice: if you don't need your money for 20 years, you shouldn't lose sleep over short-term drops in the market. And if you are investing for the long run, you can afford to lose 50% of your portfolio today.

Well said. Most people should follow Mark Cuban's recent advice:

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/15/where-to-put-your-money-r...

yeah but he is putting ALL of that billions into stocks (100%!), that is pretty damn aggressive for someone especially at his age. This is a huge aggressive move on his part, and if Warren Buffet - the richest guy in the world - is buying and thinks stocks are cheap, I personally would find it hard to sleep at night if I didn't do the same.

Read again. He is only doing that with his personal investments. It is not "billions".

Buffet owns about 27% of Bershire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is $196 billion. 27% of $196 billion is $53 billion. Warren Buffet's estimated net worth is $62.3 billion - that means he has a little less than $10 billion for personal investments.