THAT SAID...
My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.
Edit: Some people seem to be misunderstanding me. I'm saying if he thought taxation was unequal or thought wealth inequality was a problem, he could have used his wealth specifically to fight against billionaires like himself, not just give money towards generic charitable causes.
Because the money isn’t being spent on your pet issue it’s being mis-spent?
Do you have evidence he didn’t try? He’s been a prolific (albeit measured) donor to candidates who have pushed for this [1].
From what I can tell, Buffett enjoyed making money. He outsourced his philanthropy to Bill & Melinda Gates. Their focus has tended to be global poverty.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/search?order=desc&q=warren+buffe...
You want another billionaire to create a super PAC?
He turned 95 years old on August 30. He was 75 when he began giving away his fortune, announcing plans in June 2006 to give away the bulk of his wealth to five foundations, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He changed his will in 2024, designating 99.5% of his remaining fortune after his death to a charitable trust overseen by his three children and also announcing in June 2024 that donations to the Gates Foundation would cease upon his death.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/buffett-kin...
if you want to know what his kids are up to.
Banks do not store their deposits in a cash vault. They loan it out (except for a reserve percentage), and charge interest on the loan. That's how they make money. That's why they offer free checking - so they can loan your money out and charge interest. They will even pay you to deposit your money, so they can loan it out and make money on it.
Wealthy people know how to make money, which means putting the money to productive use creating goods and services that people want. If that money is confiscated from them, there's that much less money creating goods and services people want.
Personally, I am terrible at timing so I just buy stocks and let them stew for years.
Life imitates art, I suppose.
The idea that humans have destroyed the planet is quite silly.
He's not exactly curing cancer but i could think of a lot more underhanded ways to make billions. I think he is above average ethically relative to his billionaire peers.
Does Coca Cola make plastic bottles? I thought their whole deal is they sell syrup to local bottlers.
I dislike plastic pollution as much as you do, but your elected representatives have more responsibility here than Buffett.
Idk how that can be considered a “life centered around greed”
Is this Stockholm Syndrome?
Buffett didn’t get, for example, a small loan of a million dollars to start. He’s been working at this longer than probably anyone what will ever read this comment has been alive.
He doesn’t care about the money in the sense I feel you’re implying.
Nobody is perfect, and holding anyone to that standard sets an impossible threshold.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Warren Buffett, but I would encourage you to dig into his Wikipedia page at least, however accurate we think that is these days.
Warren buffet did good and he came up with a winning strategy. Momentum was ultimately his friend and what drove his success. When ETFs are great today and their popularity largely because of Warren, I think a lot of what's increasingly becoming obviously wrong with the markets ties back to the original strategy behind ETFs.
There's no more self selection or focus on fundamentals. All pensions are now exposed and regular contributors to the markets, so winner and losing picking doesn't really exist in the same way and performance is no longer tied to reality. I dread what that means as populations stagnant since it puts some risk on future pensions and their somewhat ponzi-esque structure.
All the pessimistic rants aside - it's insane to refer me to a billionaire's wiki as an attempt to get to know them. I largely look at people based on how they might treat family, friends, strangers, etc. In that regard, I'm mixed.
I'm far less of a risk taker than he is, and have consequently not made big scores like Musk.
Some disagree with your assessment(!)
> but Musk is
I'm going to reserve judgement on that because the media lens is pretty distorting. He's not afraid to stand up to bullies, and I've seen that interpreted as assholishness.
Steve Jobs also had a reputation as an asshole. A couple of my friends had encounters with him, and I asked is he really an asshole? Both confidently said yes. !!
Buffett started with 1.2 million dollars (105K in 1956) in investments from his family, i.e. his aunt, sister, and father in law.
It is very nearly impossible to get rich without starting with a huge chunk of money, Buffett is no exception.
Wikipedia page on Buffett:
At 11, he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself, and three for his sister Doris Buffett (who also became a philanthropist).[20][21][22] At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly (equivalent to $3,057 in 2024) delivering Washington Post newspapers. In high school, he invested in a business owned by his father and bought a 40-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer.[23] He bought the land when he was 14 years old with $1,200 (equivalent to $21,434 in 2024) of his savings.[23] By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had amassed $9,800 in savings (equivalent to $129,511 in 2024).[18]
Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents.
Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone to a prestigious school with nice computers, or have been able to fail at traf-o-data and keep going, for example.
His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.
The older I get, the more I believe that "you can start with nothing and make it" is essentially a lie told to the working class to keep them from cannibalizing the rich (via taxation).
Yes. Remember Woz had no money and no computer and still wrote Apple Basic. He wrote it in a notebook and hand-assembled it. An 8 bit Basic can be written in about 2K bytes.
I designed and built a 6800 computer in 1978, and wrote the software for it all in asm (the result was a VT-100 terminal workalike). I did have an assembler available which certainly made me more productive, but it was still small enough to do by hand. There were only 40 instructions or so in the 6800, and after a while one inadvertently had them memorized. You could hand assemble them as fast as you could write. In those days I wrote code asm in pencil in a spiral notebook.
What made Gates & Allen special was not their families, but their ability to see the opportunity that everyone else missed. When the MITS computer was the front page on Popular Science magazine, Allen saw it and ran to Gates exclaiming that this was the opportunity they were looking for, and they needed to get to work on it immediately.
IBM gave Gary Kildall the opportunity first. Gary whiffed the deal, and then IBM went to Gates. Gary Kildall did not have a wealthy background, and he became quite wealthy off of CP/M.
In retrospect, I wish I had pressed my dad to write an account of his wartime experiences. Fortunately, his letters were saved, but unfortunately, the letters were censored and so were kinda cardboard.
Happy New Year to you too.
I don't know to what extent Buffet does it. Nor does our current quasi-fascist society where the government is highly embedded with industry and regulating who is the winner and who is the loser and then taxing/inflating the working class to make sure they stay afloat.
But in the idealistic version of America, it is supposed to be a place where becoming a billionaire means you are not just producing billions of profit for yourself, but billions of value for others. That every deal, both sides are better off. This is what we aspire to, the whole ideal towards voluntary trade and capitalism as a method a tide that rises almost all boats and at the very least doesn't involve sinking another boat lower.
They can buy stock, but B-H doesn't pay dividends. So the only way to make money with its stock is to flip it to someone who's willing to pay more.