This is part of my profiles on history's greatest innovators, founders, and investors. Check out the profiles of Charlie Munger, Rose Blumkin, Bernard Arnault, Steve Jobs, Rick Rubin, or browse them all. You can also browse my collection of the greatest speeches, interviews, and letters of all-time.

Warren Buffett is one of the greatest investors of all time. Warren Buffett has built one of the world's largest conglomerates in history, full of incredible companies from See's Candies to GEICO, from a standing start in 1965. When Buffett took the helm of Berkshire in 1965 its book value per share was $19.46 and its intrinsic value per share far, far lower. Today, its book value per share exceeds $200,000. The growth rate in book value per share during that period is about 19% compounded annually. Berkshire is now a holding company engaged in 80 distinct business lines. And it all started by acquiring a failing textile manufacturer, which is where Berkshire Hathaway got its name and then slowly reinvesting in compounding over decades.

Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. As a result of his immense investment success, Buffett is one of the best-known investors in the world. As of December 2023, he had a net worth of $120 billion, making him the richest person in the world.

Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska. The son of US congressman and businessman Howard Buffett, he developed an interest in business and investing during his youth. He entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 before graduating from the University of Nebraska at 19. He went on to graduate from Columbia Business School, where he molded his investment philosophy around the concept of value investing pioneered by Benjamin Graham. He attended New York Institute of Finance to focus on his economics background and soon pursued a business career. He later began various business ventures and investment partnerships, including one with Graham. He created Buffett Partnership Ltd. in 1956 and his investment firm eventually acquired a textile manufacturing firm, Berkshire Hathaway, assuming its name to create a diversified holding company. Buffett emerged as the company's chairman and majority shareholder in 1970. In 1978, fellow investor and long-time business associate Charlie Munger joined Buffett as Vice Chairman.

Since 1970, Buffett has presided as the chairman and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, one of America's foremost holding companies and world's leading corporate conglomerates. He has been referred to as the "Oracle" or "Sage" of Omaha by global media as a result of having accumulated a massive fortune derived from his business and investment success. He is noted for his adherence to the principles of value investing, and his frugality despite his vast wealth.

On this page:

• All Articles on Warren Buffett
• Who is Warren Buffett? A Brief Biography
• Quotes and Advice from Warren Buffett
• See’s Candy: The Turning Point for Berkshire Hathaway
• How Warren Buffett Built Berkshire Hathaway
• Warren Buffett’s Strategy for Berkshire Hathaway
• How Warren Buffett Deploys and Allocates Capital at Berkshire Hathaway
• How Warren Buffett Invests Berkshire Hathaway’s Insurance Portfolios
• How Warren Buffett Acquires Companies at Berkshire Hathaway
• How Warren Buffett Manages Berkshire Hathaway’s Companies
• Warren Buffett’s Approach to Corporate Governance
• What An Average Day is Like for Warren Buffett
• How Warren and Todd Combs Select Investments
• Warren's Testimony on Salomon Brothers (1991)
• Warren Buffett on Mental Fortitude
• Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters
• Glossary of Terms Used by Warren Buffett
• Books Written on Warren Buffett
• See Also

All Articles on Warren Buffett

Browse all of the articles and book summaries I've written on Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

• Interview with Warren Buffett’s Biographer Alice Schroeder
• How to Widen Your Moat Daily
• My Personal Dictionary: Terms and Ideas That Resonate With Me
• Some Thoughts On Selling Your Business from Warren Buffet
• Charlie Munger on "The Berkshire System" - 50th Anniversary Essay on Berkshire Hathaway
• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Warren's Ideas from 50+ Years Grouped by Topic
• Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
• The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

Who is Warren Buffett? A Brief Biography

Warren Buffett was born in 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska, where his family had deep roots. His grandfather ran a well-known local grocery store, and his father was a stockbroker in downtown Omaha and later a congressman. Buffett inherited their folksy personal style. He exhibited early entrepreneurial tendencies and pursued a variety of ventures, starting at the age of six and continuing through high school, including paper routes, vending machines, and soft drink reselling. After a brief stint at Wharton, he graduated from the University of Nebraska at age twenty and began to apply to business schools.

Buffett had always been interested in the stock market, and at age nineteen read a book called The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which was a Paul-to-Damascus-type epiphany for him. Buffett was converted overnight into a value investor, following Graham's formula of buying companies that were statistically cheap, trading at significant discounts to net working capital ("net/nets," as they were known). He began to employ this strategy in investing the proceeds from his early business ventures (approximately $10,000 at the time), and after getting rejected by Harvard Business School, he went to Columbia to study with Graham. He became the star of Graham's class and received the first A+ the professor had awarded in his more than twenty years at Columbia.

After graduation in 1952, Buffett asked Graham for a job at his investment firm, but was turned down and returned to Omaha, where he took a job as a broker. The first company he recommended to clients was GEICO, a car insurance company that sold policies directly to government employees. The company had initially attracted Buffett's attention because Graham was its chair-man, but the more he studied it, the more he realized GEICO had both important competitive advantages and a margin of safety, Graham's term for a price well below intrinsic value (the price a fully informed, sophisticated buyer would pay for the company). He invested the majority of his net worth in the company and attempted to interest his firm's clients in the stock. He found this a hard sell, however, and more generally found the brokerage business to be far removed from the investment research he had come to love.

He maintained contact with Graham during this period, constantly sending him stock ideas. Finally, in 1954, Graham relented and offered Buffett a job. Buffett moved back to New York and for the next two years worked for Graham researching net/nets (he later used the colorful analogy of "cigar butts" to describe these cheap, often low-quality, companies). In 1956, Graham dissolved his firm to focus on other interests (which included translating Aeschylus from ancient Greek), and Buffett returned to Omaha and raised a small ($105,000) investment partnership from friends and family. His own net worth had grown to $140,000 (over $1 million today).

Over the next thirteen years, Buffett achieved extraordinary results, materially beating the S&P every single year without employing leverage. These results were generally achieved using Graham's deep value approach. Buffett, however, made two large investments in the mid-1960s, American Express and Disney, that did not follow Graham's dictates and that presaged a larger shift in his investment philosophy toward higher-quality companies with strong competitive barriers.

In 1965, Buffett bought control of Berkshire Hathaway through the Buffett Partnership. He ran the partnership for four more years with continuing excellent results, and then in 1969 (not coincidentally, the same year Henry Singleton stopped making acquisitions at Teledyne), abruptly dissolved it in the face of the high prices of the late 1960s' bull market. He did, however, retain his ownership interest in Berkshire, seeing in it a potential future vehicle for his investment activity.

Immediately after buying control of Berkshire, Buffett installed a new CEO, Ken Chace. In the first three years under Chace's leadership, the company generated $14 million of cash as Chace reduced inventories and sold off excess plants and equipment, and the business experienced a (rare) cyclical burst of profitability. The lion's share of this capital was used to acquire National Indemnity, a niche insurance company that generated prodigious amounts of cash in the form of float, premium income generated in advance of losses and expenses. Buffett invested this float very effectively, buying both publicly traded securities and wholly owned businesses, including the Omaha Sun, a weekly newspaper in Omaha, and a bank in Rockford, Illinois.

Outside Berkshire Hathaway at the same time, Buffett began to work more closely with Charlie Munger, another Omaha native and a brilliant lawyer and investor who was based on the West Coast and had emerged as Buffett's confidant. By the early 1980s, Munger and Buffett would formalize their partnership at Berkshire with Munger becoming Vice Chairman, a position he still holds.

Quotes and Advice from Warren Buffett

“As a wise friend told me long ago, 'If you want to get a reputation as a good businessman, be sure to get into a good business.'”
— Warren Buffett, 2006 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“In our book, alignment means being a partner in both directions, not just on the upside.. Many 'alignment' plans flunk this basic test, being artful forms of 'heads I win, tails you lose.'”
— Warren Buffett, 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“In all instances, we pursue rationality.”
— Warren Buffett, 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On managers with truly aligned incentives:
“Managers eager to bet heavily on their abilities usually have plenty of ability to bet on.”
— Warren Buffett, 1991 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“Call this Noah's Law: If an ark may be essential for survival, begin building it today, no matter how cloudless the skies appear.”
— Warren Buffett, 2015 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On sharing bad news quickly:
“I can handle bad news but I don't like to deal with it after it has festered for awhile.”
— Warren Buffett, 2010 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On the strength of Berkshire's culture:
“Our compensation programs, our annual meeting, and even our annual reports are all designed with an eye to reinforcing the Berkshire culture, and making it one that will repel and expel managers of a different bent. This culture grows stronger every year, and it will remain intact long after Charlie and I have left the scene.”
— Warren Buffett, 2010 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“Eventually, our economic fate will be determined by the economic fate of the businesses we own, whether our ownership is partial or total.”
— Warren Buffett, 1987 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“We are quite content to hold any security indefinitely, so long as the prospective return on equity capital of the underlying business is satisfactory, management is competent, and the market does not overvalue the business.”
— Warren Buffett, 1987 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“Paradoxically, when 'dumb' money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.”
— Warren Buffett, 1993 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“Indeed, we believe that according the name 'investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic.”
— Warren Buffett, 1991 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“Growth benefits investors only when the business in point can invest at incremental returns that are enticing—in other words, only when each dollar used to finance the growth creates over a dollar of long-term market value. In the case of a low-return business requiring additional funds, growth hurts the investor.”
— Warren Buffett, 1992 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

“In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses: How to Value a Business and How to Think About Market Prices.”
— Warren Buffett, 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

When time is your friend:
“In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces—never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen. Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.”
— Warren Buffett, 1989 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On avoid problems rather than solving them:
“After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have *not* learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers.”
— Warren Buffett, 1989 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

Bad economics always trumps brilliant management:
“I've said many times that when a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact. I just wish I hadn't been so energetic in creating examples.”
— Warren Buffett, 1989 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On the power of a single zero:
“Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero. That is not an equation whose effects I would like to experience personally, and I would like even less to be responsible for imposing its penalties upon others.”
— Warren Buffett, 2005 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On the difficulties of maintaining purchasing power:
“Even in the U.S., where the wish for a stable currency is strong, the dollar has fallen a staggering 86% in value since 1965, when I took over management of Berkshire. It takes no less than $7 today to buy what $1 did at that time.” (Note: This 86% drop happened over just 46 years from 1965–2011.)
— Warren Buffett, 2011 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter

On speculation:
“As bandwagon investors join any party, they create their own truth—for a while.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 129

On long-term time horizons and patience:
“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 132

On the pain of actual hard thought:
“Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 134

“It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 134

Why every business has to be able to absorb shocks:
“The roads of business are riddled with potholes; a plan that requires dodging them all is a place for disaster.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 135

On cherrypicked backwards looking data:
“Beware of past-performance 'proofs' in finance: If history books were the key to riches, the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 136

Why underinvestment isn't a great long-term strategy:
“Capital outlays at a business can be skipped, of course, in any given month, just as a human can skip a day or even a week of eating. But if the skipping becomes routine and is not made up, the body weakens and eventually dies.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 141

On zero-coupon bonds:
“No financial instrument is evil per se; it's just that some variations have more potential for mischief than others.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 143

On EBITDA and meeting interest expenses:
“Our advice: Whenever an investment banker starts talking about EBITDA—or whenever someone creates a capital structure that does not allow all interest, both payable and accrued, to be comfortably met out of current cash flow net of ample capital expenditures—zip up your wallet.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 143

Competitive costs and commodity businesses:
“In an unregulated commodity business, a company must lower its costs to competitive levels or face extinction.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 147

Why to avoid commodity businesses:
“In a business selling a commodity-type product, it's impossible to be a lot smarter than your dumbest competitor.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 149

On derivatives and daisy-chain risk:
“History teaches us that a crisis often causes problems to correlate in a manner undreamed of in more tranquil times. … When a 'chain reaction' threat exists within an industry, it pays to minimize links of any kind.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 157

The root of Berkshire's aversion to risk:
“Charlie and I believe Berkshire should be a fortress of financial strength—for the sake of our owners, creditors, policyholders and employees.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 159

CEOs who run large derivatives books:
“From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOS who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mind-boggling screw-ups that are required.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 163

The all important power of earnings:
“With unimportant exceptions, such as bankruptcies in which some of a company's losses are borne by creditors, *the most that owners in aggregate can earn between now and Judgement Day is what their businesses in aggregate earn*.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 177

High fees in investment products:
“Performance comes, performance goes. Fees never falter.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 182

On attracting the right shareholders:
“Through our policies and communications—our 'advertisements'—we try to attract investors who will understand our operations, attitudes and expectations. …We want those who think of themselves as business owners and invest in companies with the intention of staying a long time. And, we want those who keep their eyes focused on business results, not market prices.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 189

Why low prices are your friend as a long-term investor:
“When Berskshire buys stock in a company that is repurchasing shares, we hope for two events: First, we have the normal hope that earnings of the business will increase at a good clip for a long time to come; and second, we also hope that the stock underperforms in the market for a long time as well.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 199

On repurchasing shares:
“My suggestion: Before even discussing repurchases, a CEO and his or her Board should stand, join hands and in unison declare, *'What is smart at one price is stupid at another.'*”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 202

The root of mistakes:
“Sometime our managers misfire. The usual cause of failure is that they start with the answer they want and then work backwards to find a supporting rationale.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 208

On spending twenty years investing in their original textile businesses:
“I wanted the business to succeed and wished my way into a series of bad decision. … But wishing makes dreams come true only in Disney movies; it's poison in business.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 208

Warren and Charlie's acquisition criteria:
“Here our test is simple: Do Charlie and I think we can effect a transaction that is likely to leave our shareholders wealthier on a per-share basis than they were prior to the acquisition?”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 208

On the eventual realities of small consistent mistakes:
“A cumulation of small managerial stupidities will produce a major stupidity—not a major triumph. Las Vegas has been built upon the wealth transfers that occur when people engage in seemingly-small disadvantageous capital transactions.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 220

Overly acquisitive CEOs:
“When such a CEO is encouraged by his advisors to make deals, he responds much as would a teenage boy who is encouraged by his father to have a normal sex life. It’s not a push he needs.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 223

Why determining the value of a business is so difficult:
“Common yardsticks such as dividend yield, the ration of price to earnings or to book value, and even growth rates having nothing to do with valuation except to the extent they provide clues to the amount and timing of cash flows into and from the business.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 237-238

On the reality that not all growth adds bottomline value:
“Growth is simply a component—usually a plus, sometimes a minus—in the value equation.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 238

Why speculation is so hard to resist:
“Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 238

On companies built in speculative bubbles:
“Value is destroyed, not created, by any business that loses money over its lifetime, no matter how high its interim valuation may get. What actually occurs in these cases is wealth transfer, often on a massive scale.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 239

The simplest definition for intrinsic value:
“Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 240

Why speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest:
“A pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 240

On Berkshire's hurdle rate for all retained earnings:
“It is our job to select businesses with economic characteristics allowing each dollar of retained earnings to be translated eventually into at least a dollar of market value.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 251

Warren's advice for investors:
“The goal of each investor should be to create a portfolio (in effect, a 'company') that will deliver him or her the highest possible look-through earnings a decade or so from now.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 251

Focus on future earnings over the current market price:
“In investing, just as in baseball, to put runs on the scoreboard one must watch the playing field, not the scoreboard.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 251

What matters is the return on capital reinvested:
“The primary test of managerial economic performance is the achievement of a high earnings rate on equity capital employed (without undue leverage, account gimmickry, etc.) and not the achievement of consistent gains in earnings per share.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 251

“Ultimately business experience, direct and vicarious, produced my present strong preference for businesses that possess large amounts of enduring Goodwill and that utilize a minimum of tangible assets.”
— The Essays of Warren Buffett, Fifth Edition, Page 252

See’s Candy: The Turning Point for Berkshire Hathaway

A pivotal investment in Buffett's shift in investment focus from "cigar butts" to "franchises" was the acquisition in 1972 of See's Candies.

Buffett and Munger bought See's for $25 million. At the time, the company had $7 million in tangible book value and $4.2 million in pretax profits, so they were paying a seemingly exorbitant multiple of over three times book value (but only six times pre-tax income).

See's was expensive by Graham's standards, and he would never have touched it. Buffett and Munger, however, saw a beloved brand with excellent returns on capital and untapped pricing power, and they immediately installed a new CEO, Chuck Huggins, to take advantage of this opportunity.

See's has experienced relatively little unit growth since it was acquired, but due to the power of its brand, it has been able to consistently raise prices, resulting in an extraordinary 32% compound return on Berkshire's investment over its first 27 years. (After 1999, See's results were no longer reported separately.)

During the last 39 years, the company has sent $1.65 billion in free cash to Omaha on an original investment of $25 million. This cash has been redeployed with great skill by Buffett, and See's has been a critical building block in Berkshire's success. (Interestingly, purchase price played a relatively minor role in generating these returns: had Buffett and Munger paid twice the price, the return would still have been a very attractive 21%.)

How Warren Buffett Built Berkshire Hathaway

Fear of inflation was a constant theme in Berkshire's annual reports throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. The conventional wisdom at the time was that hard assets (gold, timber, and the like) were the most effective inflation hedges. Buffett, however, under Munger's influence and in a shift from Graham's traditional approach, had come to a different conclusion. His contrarian insight was that companies with low capital needs and the ability to raise prices were actually best positioned to resist inflation's corrosive effects.

This led him to invest in consumer brands and media properties—businesses with "franchises," dominant market positions, or brand names. Along with this shift in investment criteria came an important shift to longer holding periods, which allowed for long-term pretax compounding of investment values.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this change. Buffet was switching at midcareer from a proven, lucrative investment approach that focused on the balance sheet and tangible assets, to an entirely different one that looked to the future and emphasized the income statement and hard-to-quantify assets like brand names and market share. To determine margin of safety, Buffett relied now on discounted cash flows and private market values instead of Graham's beloved net working capital calculation. It was not unlike Bob Dylan's controversial and roughly contemporaneous switch from acoustic to electric guitar.

This tectonic shift played itself out throughout the 1970s in Berkshire's insurance portfolios, which saw an increasing proportion of media and branded consumer products companies. By the end of the decade, this transition was complete, and Buffett's portfolio included outright ownership of See's Candies and the Buffalo News as well as large stock positions in the Washington Post, GEICO, and General Foods.

In the first half of the 1980s, Buffett focused on adding to the company's portfolio of wholly owned companies, buying the Nebraska Furniture Mart for $60 million in 1983 and Scott Fetzer, a conglomerate of niche industrial businesses, in 1985 for $315 million. In 1986, he made his largest investment yet, committing $500 million to help his friend Tom Murphy, the CEO of Capital Cities, acquire ABC. Buffett and Berkshire ended up owning 18 percent of the combined company, and it became the third of his "permanent" stock holdings, alongside GEICO and The Washington Post Company.

By 1987, in advance of the October market crash, Buffett had sold all of the stocks in his insurance company portfolios, except for his three core positions. After the Capital Cities transaction, he did not make another public market investment until 1989, when he announced that he had made the largest investment in Berkshire's history: investing an amount equal to one-quarter of Berkshire's book value in the Coca-Cola Company, purchasing 7% of its shares.

In the late 1980s, Buffett made a handful of investments in convertible preferred securities in publicly traded companies, including Salomon Brothers, Gillette, US Airways, and Champion Industries. The dividends from these securities were tax advantaged, providing Berkshire with an attractive yield and the potential for upside (via the ability to convert to common stock) if the companies performed well.

In 1991, Salomon Brothers was at the center of a major financial scandal, accused of fixing prices in government Treasury bill auctions, and Buffett was drafted as interim CEO to help the company navigate the crisis. He devoted himself full-time for a little over nine months to this project, calming regulators, installing a new CEO, and attempting to rationalize Salomon's byzantine compensation programs. In the end, the company ended up paying a relatively small settlement and eventually returned to its former prosperity. Late in 1996, Salomon was sold to Sandy Weill's Travelers Corporation for $9 billion, a significant premium to Buffett's investment cost.

In the early 1990s, Buffett continued to make selected, sizable public market investments, including large positions in Wells Fargo (1990), General Dynamics (1992), and American Express (1994). As the decade progressed, Buffett once again shifted his focus to acquisitions, culminating in two significant insurance transactions: the $2.3 billion purchase in 1996 of the half of GEICO that he did not already own and the purchase of reinsurer General Re in 1998 for $22 billion in Berkshire stock, the largest transaction in the company's history.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Buffett was an opportunistic buyer of private companies, many of them in industries out of favor after the September 11 terrorist attacks, including Shaw Carpets, Benjamin Moore Paints, and Clayton Homes. He also made a series of significant investments in the electric utility industry through MidAmerican Energy, a joint venture with his Omaha friend Walter Scott, the former CEO of Kiewit Construction.

During this period, Buffett was also active in a variety of investing areas outside of traditional equity markets. In 2003, he made a large ($7 billion) and very lucrative bet on junk bonds, then enormously out of favor. In 2003 and 2004, he made a significant ($20 billion) currency bet against the dollar, and in 2006, he announced Berkshire's first international acquisition: the $5 billion purchase of Istar, a leading manufacturer of cutting tools and blades based in Israel that has prospered under Berkshire's ownership.

Several years of inactivity followed, interrupted by the financial crisis in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, after which Buffett entered one of the most active investing periods of his career. This stretch of activity reached its climax with Berkshire's purchase of the nation's largest railroad, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, in early 2010 at a total valuation of $34.2 billion.

So, here are those interplanetary numbers. From June, 1965, when Buffett assumed control of Berkshire, through 2011, the value of the company's shares had increased at a phenomenal compound rate of 20.7%, dwarfing the 9.3% returns of the S&P 500 over the same period. A dollar invested at the time of Buffett's takeover was worth $6,265 just 45 years later. (A dollar invested at the time of Buffett's first stock purchase was worth over $10,000.) That same dollar invested in the S&P was worth $62.

During Buffett's long tenure, Berkshire Hathaway's returns have exceeded those of the S&P by an extraordinary hundredfold, massively outperforming any index of peers.

Warren Buffett’s Strategy for Berkshire Hathaway

Buffett's exceptional results derived from an idiosyncratic approach in three critical and interrelated areas: Capital generation, capital allocation, and management of operations.

Charlie Munger has said that the secret to Berkshire's long-term success has been its ability to "generate funds at 3% and invest them at 13%," and this consistent ability to create low-cost funds for investment has been an under-appreciated contributor to the company's financial success. Remarkably, Buffett has almost entirely eschewed debt and equity issuances—virtually all of Berkshire's investment capital has been generated internally.

The company's primary source of capital has been float from its insurance subsidiaries, although very significant cash has also been provided by wholly owned subsidiaries and by the occasional sale of investments. Buffett has in effect created a capital "flywheel" at Berkshire, with funds from these sources being used to acquire full or partial interests in other cash-generating businesses whose earnings in turn fund other investments, and so on.

Insurance is Berkshire's most important business by a wide margin and the critical foundation of its extraordinary growth. Buffett developed a distinctive approach to the insurance business, which bears interesting similarities to his broader approach to management and capital allocation.

When Buffett acquired National Indemnity in 1967, he was among the first to recognize the leverage inherent in insurance companies with the ability to generate low-cost float. The acquisition was, in his words, a "watershed" for Berkshire. As he explains, "Float is money we hold but don't own. In an insurance operation, float arises because premiums are received before losses are paid, an interval that sometimes extends over many years. During that time, the insurer invests the money." This is another example of a powerful iconoclastic metric, one that the rest of the industry largely ignored at the time.

Over time, Buffett evolved an idiosyncratic strategy for his insurance operations that emphasized profitable underwriting and float generation over growth in premium revenue. This approach, wildly different from most other insurance companies, relied on a willingness to avoid underwriting insurance when pricing was low, even if short-term profitability might suffer, and, conversely, a propensity to write extraordinarily large amounts of business when prices were attractive.

This approach led to lumpy, but highly profitable, underwriting results. As an example, in 1984, Berkshire's largest property and casualty (P&C) insurer, National Indemnity, wrote $62.2 million in premiums. Two years later, premium volumes grew an extraordinary sixfold to $366.2 million. By 1989, they had fallen back 73% to $98.4 million and did not return to the $100 million level for 12 years. Three years later, in 2004, the company wrote over $600 million in premiums. Over this period, National Indemnity averaged an annual underwriting profit of 6.5% as a percentage of premiums. In contrast, over the same period, the typical property and casualty insurer averaged a loss of 7%.

This sawtooth pattern of revenue would be virtually impossible for an independent, publicly traded insurer to explain to Wall Street. Because, however, Berkshire's insurance subsidiaries are part of a much larger diversified company, they are shielded from Wall Street scrutiny. This provides a major competitive advantage allowing National Indemnity and Berkshire’s other insurance businesses to focus on profitability, not premium growth. As Buffet has said, "Charlie and I have always preferred a lumpy 15 percent to a smooth 12 percent return."

Float for all of Berkshire's insurance businesses grew enormously over this period, from $237 million in 1970 to over $70 billion in 2011. This incredibly low-cost source of funds has been the rocket fuel propelling Berkshire's phenomenal results, and, as we will see, these alternating periods of inactivity and decisive action mirror the pattern of Berkshire's investing activities. In both insurance and investing, Buffett believes the key to long-term success is "temperament," a willingness to be "fearful when others are greedy and greedy when they are fearful."

The other important source of capital at Berkshire has been earnings from wholly owned companies. These earnings have become increasingly important over the last two decades as Buffett has added aggressively to Berkshire's portfolio of businesses. In 1990, pretax earnings from wholly owned operating companies were $102 million. In 2000, they were $918 million, a 24.5% compound growth rate. By 2011, they had reached an extraordinary $6.9 billion.

How Warren Buffett Deploys and Allocates Capital at Berkshire Hathaway

Now we'll turn our attention to how Buffett deploys the geyser of capital provided by Berkshire's operations. Whenever Buffett buys a company, he takes immediate control of the cash flow, insisting that excess cash be sent to Omaha for allocation. As Charlie Munger points out, "Unlike operations (which are very centralized), capital allocation at Berkshire is highly centralized." This mix of loose and tight, of delegation and hierarchy, was present at all the other outsider companies but generally not to Berkshire's extreme degree.

Buffett, already an extraordinarily successful investor, came to Berkshire uniquely prepared for allocating capital. Most CEOs are limited by prior experience to investment opportunities within their own industry—they are hedgehogs. Buffett, in contrast, by virtue of his prior experience evaluating investments in a wide variety of securities and industries, was a classic fox and had the advantage of choosing from a much wider menu of allocation options, including the purchase of private companies and publicly traded stocks. Simply put, the more investment options a CEO has, the more likely he or she is to make high-return decisions, and this broader palate has translated into a significant competitive advantage for Berkshire.

Buffett's approach to capital allocation was unique: he never paid a dividend or repurchased significant amounts of stock. Instead, with Berkshire's companies typically requiring little capital investment, he focused on investing in publicly traded stocks and acquiring private companies, options not available to most CEOs who lacked his extensive investment experience. Before we look at these two areas, however, let's first examine a critical early decision.

After a brief flirtation with the textile business, Buffett chose early on to make no further investments in Berkshire's low-return legacy suit-linings business and to harvest all excess capital and deploy it elsewhere. In contrast, Burlington Industries, the largest company in the textile business then and now, chose a different path, deploying all available capital into its existing business between 1965 and 1985. Over that 26 year period, Burlington's stock appreciated at a paltry annual rate of 0.6%; Berkshire's compound return was a remarkable 27%. These differing results tell an important capital allocation parable: the value of being in businesses with attractive returns on capital, and the related importance of getting out of low-return businesses.

This was a key decision for Berkshire and makes a more general point. A critical part of capital allocation, one that receives less attention than more glamorous activities like acquisitions, is deciding which businesses are no longer deserving of future investment due to low returns. The outsider CEOs were generally ruthless in closing or selling businesses with poor future prospects and concentrating their capital on business units whose returns met their internal targets. As Buffett said when he finally closed Berkshire's textile business in 1985, "Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks."

How Warren Buffett Invests Berkshire Hathaway’s Insurance Portfolios

Buffett is still best known for stock market investing, which was the primary channel for Berkshire's capital during his first twenty-five years as CEO. Buffett's public market returns are Ruthian by any measure, and there are several different ways to look at them.

As we have seen, the average returns for the Buffett Partnership from 1957 to 1969 were 30.4%, and according to a study in Money Week magazine, Berkshire's investment returns from 1985 through 2005 were an extraordinary 25%.

Because of its importance to Berkshire's overall returns and the window it provides on Buffett's broader capital allocation philosophy, it's worth taking a close look at one particular facet of Buffett's approach to public market investing: portfolio management. Portfolio management—how many stocks an investor owns and how long he holds them—has an enormous impact on returns. Two investors with the same investment philosophy but different approaches to portfolio management will produce dramatically different results. Buffett's approach to managing Berkshire's stock investments has been distinguished by two primary characteristics: a high degree of concentration and extremely long holding periods. In each of these areas, his thinking is unconventional.

Buffett believes that exceptional returns come from concentrated portfolios, that excellent investment ideas are rare, and he has repeatedly told students that their investing results would improve if at the beginning of their careers, they were handed a twenty-hole punch card representing the total number of investments they could make in their investing lifetimes. "We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it."

Buffett's pattern of investment at Berkshire has been similar to the pattern of underwriting at his insurance subsidiaries, with long periods of inactivity interspersed with occasional large in-vestments. The top five positions in Berkshire's portfolio have typically accounted for a remarkable 60-80% of total value. This compares with 10-20% for the typical mutual fund portfolio. On at least four occasions, Buffett invested over 15% of Berkshire's book value in a single stock, and he once had 40% of the Buffett Partnership invested in American Express.

The other distinguishing characteristic of Buffett's approach to portfolio management is extraordinarily long holding periods. He has held his current top five stock positions (with the exception of IBM, which was purchased in 2011) for over 20 years on average. This compares with an average holding period of less than one year for the typical mutual fund. This translates into an exceptionally low level of investment activity, characterized by Buffett as "inactivity bordering on sloth."

These two portfolio management tenets combine to form a powerful and highly selective filter, one that very few companies pass through.

Interestingly, despite his historic advocacy of stock repurchases, Buffett (with the exception of a few small, early buybacks) is the only CEO in this book who did not buy back significant amounts of his company's stock. Despite admiring and encouraging the repurchases of other CEOs, he has felt buybacks were counter to Berkshire's unique, partnership-like culture and could potentially tamper with the bonds of trust built up over many years of honest, forthright communications and outstanding returns.

That being said, Buffett is nothing if not opportunistic. On the rare occasions (two, actually) when Berkshire's stock traded for extended periods at valuations well below intrinsic value, Buffett broke with tradition and explored a repurchase—as he did in early 2001, when the stock fell precipitously during the Internet bubble, and, more recently, in September 2011, when he announced that he would buy back significant amounts of stock at prices below 1.1 times book value. In both cases, the stock quickly moved up, preventing Berkshire from purchasing a meaningful number of shares.

How Warren Buffett Acquires Companies at Berkshire Hathaway

The other major outlet for Berkshire's capital has been the purchase of private companies. This channel has quietly become the primary one for Buffett over the last twenty years, culminating in the massive Burlington Northern purchase in early 2010. His approach to these acquisitions is homegrown and unique.

Buffett has created an attractive, highly differentiated option for sellers of large private businesses, one that falls somewhere between an IPO and a private equity sale. A sale to Berkshire is unique in allowing an owner/operator to achieve liquidity while continuing to run the company without interference or Wall Street scrutiny. Buffett offers an environment that is completely free of corporate bureaucracy, with unlimited access to capital for worthwhile projects. This package is highly differentiated from the private equity alternative, which promises a high level of investor involvement and a typical five-year holding period before the next exit event.

Buffett never participates in auctions. As David Sokol, the (now former) CEO of MidAmerican Energy and NetJets, told me, "We simply don't get swept away by the excitement of bidding." Instead, remarkably, Buffett has created a system in which the owners of leading private companies call him. He avoids negotiating valuation, asking interested sellers to contact him and name their price. He promises to give an answer "usually in five minutes or less." This requirement forces potential sellers to move quickly to their lowest acceptable price and ensures that his time is used efficiently.

Buffett does not spend significant time on traditional due diligence and arrives at deals with extraordinary speed, often within a few days of first contact. He never visits operating facilities and rarely meets with management before deciding on an acquisition. Tom Murphy told me, "Capital Cities was one of the biggest investments Berkshire had ever made.... It took only fifteen minutes to talk through the deal and agree on terms."

Buffett, the master delegator, has never, however, delegated capital allocation decisions. There is no business development team or investment committee at Berkshire, and Buffett never relies on investment bankers, accountants, or lawyers (with the exception of Munger) for advice. He does his own analytical work and handles all negotiations personally. He never looks at the forecasts provided by intermediaries, preferring instead to focus on historical financial statements and make his own projections.

He is able to move quickly because he only buys companies in industries he knows well, allowing him to focus quickly on key operating metrics. As Charlie Munger has said about Berkshire's approach to acquisitions, "We don't try to do acquisitions, we wait for no-brainers."

How Warren Buffett Manages Berkshire Hathaway’s Companies

Buffett, in addition to being the greatest investor of his generation, has proven to be an extremely effective manager of Berkshire's growing, polyglot portfolio of operating businesses. Over the last ten years, Berkshire has grown earnings per share significantly, and despite its size and diversity, the company operates with extraordinary efficiency—consistently ranking in the top quartile of the Fortune 500 for return on tangible assets.

Buffett came to the CEO role without any relevant operating experience and consciously designed Berkshire to allow him to focus his time on capital allocation, while spending as little time as possible managing operations, where he felt he could add little value. As a result, the touchstone of the Berkshire system is extreme decentralization. If Teledyne, Capital Cities, and the other companies in this book had decentralized management styles and philosophies, Berkshire's is positively anarchic by comparison.

In a company with over 270,000 employees, there are only 23 at corporate headquarters in Omaha. There are no regular budget meetings for Berkshire companies. The CEOs who run Berkshire's subsidiary companies simply never hear from Buffett unless they call for advice or seek capital for their businesses. He summarizes this approach to management as "hire well, manage little" and believes this extreme form of decentralization increases the overall efficiency of the organization by reducing overhead and releasing entrepreneurial energy.

In his 1986 Berkshire annual report, Buffett (as we saw in the introduction) described the discovery of the surprisingly powerful institutional imperative, which led managers to mindlessly imitate their peers. Cognizant of Churchill's quotation (which he has frequently cited), he has intentionally structured his company and life to avoid the effects of this imperative. Buffett spends his time differently than other Fortune 500 CEOs, managing his schedule to avoid unnecessary distractions and preserving uninterrupted time to read (five newspapers daily and countless annual reports) and think. He prides himself on keeping a blank calendar, devoid of regular meetings. He does not have a computer in his office and has never had a stock ticker.

Buffett's approach to investor relations is also unique and home-grown. Buffett estimates the average CEO spends 20% of his time communicating with Wall Street. In contrast, he spends no time with analysts, never attends investment conferences, and has never provided quarterly earnings guidance He prefers to communicate with his investors through detailed annual reports and meetings both of which are unique.

Printed on plain, uncoated paper with a simple, single-color cover, Berkshire's annual report looks different from other annual reports. The core of the report is a long essay written by Buffett (with editorial assistance from Carol Loomis) that provides a detailed review of the company's various businesses over the past year. The style is direct and informal, and the reports are models of concision and clarity, with detailed information for each operating division and an "owner's manual" clearly outlining Buffett and Munger's distinctive operating philosophy.

The annual meetings are also unique. The administrative portion of the meeting typically takes no more than fifteen minutes, after which Buffett and Munger answer questions from shareholders for up to five hours. The meetings attract enormous crowds (over 35,000 people attended the 2011 meeting), and Buffett has taken to referring to them as "the Woodstock of capitalism." The annual reports and meetings reinforce a powerful culture that values frugality, independent thinking, and long-term stewardship. (Also, whimsy and humor-when Buffett stepped out of character in the early 1990s and purchased a corporate plane, he dubbed it "The Indefensible" and disclosed it in the annual report in laughably small print.)

Another unconventional shareholder practice relates to stock splits. Buffett has famously eschewed splitting Berkshire's A shares, which currently trade at over $120,000, more than fifty times the price of the next-highest issue on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). He believes these splits are purely cosmetic and likens the process to dividing a pizza into eight versus four slices, with no change in calories or asset value delivered. Avoiding stock splits is yet another filter, helping Berkshire to self-select for long-term owners. In 1996, he reluctantly agreed to create a lower-priced class of B shares, which traded at one-thirtieth of the A shares and were the second-highest-priced issue on the NYSE. (In connection with the Burlington Northern deal in early 2010, Buffett agreed to split the B shares a further 50:1 to accommodate the railroad's smaller investors.)

Warren Buffett’s Approach to Corporate Governance

Warren Buffett's approach to corporate governance is also unconventional, contradicting many of the dictates of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Buffett believes that the best boards are composed of relatively small groups (Berkshire has twelve directors) of experienced businesspeople with large ownership stakes. (He requires that all directors have significant personal capital invested in Berkshire's stock.) He believes directors should have exposure to the consequences of poor decisions (Berkshire does not carry insurance for its directors) and should not be reliant on the income from board fees, which are minimal at Berkshire.

This approach, which leaves him with a small group of "insiders" by Sarbanes-Oxley standards, provides a stark contrast with most public company boards, whose members rarely have meaningful personal capital invested alongside shareholders, whose downsides are limited by insurance, and whose fees often represent a high percentage of their total income. Which approach leads to better alignment with shareholders?

What An Average Day is Like for Warren Buffett

A look at Warren Buffett's average day from an interview with his biography Alice Schroeder.

Miguel: Could you shed some light on Buffett’s daily life? What is his daily routine? Maybe you could comment on his interactions with the management teams.

Alice: Sure. He comes in the morning and his routine is to switch on CNBC with the sound muted and start reading while glancing at the crawl from time to time. The wooden shutters on the windows are always closed. You get no sense that a world exists outside, which is what he wants, no distractions. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t need sunlight.

He is already pretty well versed on the news by the time he gets in, through the Internet and television. But he still prefers newspapers. He reads the WSJ, NYT, Financial Times, Washington Post, the Omaha World-Herald. He reads some offbeat things like the NY Observer. He reads all sorts of trade press relating to the different businesses that Berkshire runs. American Banker, Oil & Gas Journal, A.M. Best, Furniture Today. There are stacks of reports from the different BRK subsidiary companies on his desk. Throughout his day he grazes through the reading pile.

Meanwhile he talks on the phone. He doesn’t make a lot of outgoing calls; people call him. That’s his day most of the time.

People do come to visit him and he’ll sit and spend an hour with someone or have lunch or dinner. A lot of days he doesn’t have anything on his schedule. His interaction with managers is minimal. Some of them call him regularly, but he’s not kidding when he says that others, he speaks to maybe a couple of times a year, or they communicate in writing. He responds if they call him. He almost never calls them. If they call him he’ll be very agreeable and talk but he keeps the conversation quite short. When they do call, he acts as a sounding board. The one thing he controls is capital decisions. But anything else, it’s pretty much up to them.

He is a very good listener who gives excellent advice, and he’s also pretty firm about not giving unasked advice. The managers vary in their desire (for asking for advice). The ones that do ask use words like “invaluable” to describe his advice.

Within headquarters he has low interaction with his staff other than with Debbie and the other secretaries. He talks to Marc Hamburg (the CFO) regularly, although not necessarily daily. He talks with his the bond trader. These conversations are very brief. You’ll notice this is a running theme… while he does have long conversations, it’s only with a few friends and only on occasions of his choosing.

In the office, he knows everyone’s name and occasionally walks down the hall and says hello to people. He is the furthest thing from a walk-around manager, though. He stays in his office (he is at one end of the hall) and everyone else sticks to their end.

Full Interview with Warren Buffett’s Biographer Alice Schroeder →

How Warren Buffett and Todd Combs Select Investments

At Graham & Dodd's Annual Breakfast in 2022, Todd Combs shared how he and Warren Buffett make investment decisions. They focus primary on asking the question: How many names in the S&P are going to be 15x earnings in the next 12 months? How many are going to earn more in five years (using a 90% confidence interval)? And how many will compound at 7% (using a 50% confidence interval)?

Combs goes to Buffett’s house on many Saturdays to talk, and here’s a litmus test they frequently use. Warren asks “How many names in the S&P are going to be 15x earnings in the next 12 months? How many are going to earn more in five years (using a 90% confidence interval), and how many will compound at 7% (using a 50% confidence interval)?” In this exercise, you are solving for cyclicality, compounding, and initial price. Combs said that this rubric was used to find Apple, since at the time the same 3-5 names kept coming up.

Read the Graham & Dodd's Annual Breakfast Q&A with Todd Combs →

Warren's Testimony on Salomon Brothers (1991)

The opening statement of Warren E. Buffett, Chairman of Salomon Brothers, before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on September 5, 1991.

A short excerpt from Warren's testimony:

…in the end, the spirit about compliance is as important or more so than words about compliance. I want the right words and I want the full range of internal controls. But I also have asked every Salomon employee to be his or her own compliance officer.

After they first obey all rules, I then want employees to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper, to be read by their spouses, children, and friends, with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.

If they follow this test, they need not fear my other message to them: Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding; lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.

Warren Buffett on Mental Fortitude

Some of the more commercially minded among you may wonder why I am talking about value investing. Adding many converts to the value approach will narrow the spreads between price and value.

I can only tell you that the secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis. Yet, I have seen no trend towards value investing in the 35 years I have practiced it.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that makes easy things difficult.

Ships will sail around the world the world, but the flat earth society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace. And those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper.

Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letters

Warren Buffett is the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a large public traded conglomerate based in Omaha, Nebraska. Every year, Warren writes Berkshire Hathaway's annual letter to shareholders — which are always generously filled with reflections, lessons learned, and wisdom on the true nature of business and investing.

• Archive of Berkshire Hathaway's Annual Letters‍
• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America

Glossary of Terms Used by Warren Buffett

The following are terms and phrases that have appeared in Berkshire Hathaway's Annual Letters, written by Warren Buffett, over the years.

Cigar Butt Investing
A foolish method of investing akin to taking the last puff on a cigar. It is the purchase of a stock at a sufficiently low price that there will be some short-term profit, though the business' long-term performance is likely to be terrible.

Circle of Competence
The limits of one's ability to judge the economics of businesses. Intelligent investors draw a thick boundary and stick with companies they can understand.

Dividend Test
Retention of earnings is only justified if each dollar retained produces at least a one dollar increase in per share market value.

Double-Barreled Acquisition Style
A sensible acquisition policy of buying either 100% of businesses in negotiated acquisitions or less than 100% of businesses in stock market purchases.

Institutional Imperative
A pervasive force in organizations that leads to irrational business decisions from resistance to change, absorption of corporate funds in suboptimal projects or acquisitions, indulgence of the cravings of senior executives, and mindless imitation of peer companies.

Intrinsic Value
A hard-to-calculate but crucial measure of business value. It is the discounted present value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life.

Look-Through Earnings
An alternative to GAAP rules governing investments in marketable securities of the investee less than 20%. This measures the investor's economic performance based on its percentage interest of the investee's undistributed earnings (after an incremental reduction for income taxes).

Margin-of-Safety
Probably the single most important principle of sound and successful investing. Ben Graham's principle says not to purchase a security unless the price being paid is substantially lower than the value being delivered.

Mr. Market
Ben Graham's allegory for the overall stock marketing. Personified as a mood, manic depressive that causes price and value to diverge — making superior intelligent investing possible.

Owner Earnings
A better measure of economic performance than cash flow or GAAP earnings. Equal to (a) operating earnings plus (b) depreciation and other non-cash charges minus (c) required reinvestment in the business to maintain present competitive position and unit volume.

Explore more terms in my Personal Dictionary →

Books Written on Warren Buffett

To make it easy to do your own research I've complied my favorite books written on Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway.

The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
This is my favorite way to read all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. In this book, Prof. Lawrence Cunningham breaks apart Warren's letters and regroups them by theme.
‍Read my book summary →

A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett
"I am a better investor because I am a businessman and a better businessman because I am an investor." Compiled by Peter Bevelin, this book will help investors like businessmen and vice versa.

Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist
Journalist Roger Lowenstein draws on three years of unprecedented access to Buffett’s family, friends, and colleagues to provide the first definitive, inside account of the life and career of this American original. Buffett explains Buffett’s investment strategy — a long-term philosophy grounded in buying stock in companies that are undervalued on the market and hanging on until their worth invariably surfaces — and shows how it is a reflection of his inner self.

See Also

For more, explore lectures, profiles, interviews, and books related to Warren Buffett:

• Who is Charlie Munger? Wit and Wisdom From The World’s Most Irreverent Billionaire
• Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
• Who is Bernard Arnault? Insights and Wisdom from the King of Luxury and Founder of LVMH
• Who is Sol Price? The Retail Revolutionary Who Built FedMart and Shaped Walmart and Costco
• Interview with Warren Buffett’s Biographer Alice Schroeder
• "Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion" from Charlie Munger's Biography
• How to Widen Your Moat Daily
• Charlie Munger on "The Berkshire System" - 50th Anniversary Essay on Berkshire Hathaway
• “The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking“ Talk by Peter Kaufman
• Warren Buffett's Memo to Berkshire's Managers on The Importance of Reputation
• Some Thoughts On Selling Your Business from Warren Buffett
• My Personal Dictionary: Terms and Ideas That Resonate With Me

Related Collections

For more, check out my collections of interviews, speeches and lectures, letters and memos, and profiles:

• History's Greatest Interviews
• History's Greatest Speeches and Talks
• History's Greatest Letters and Memos
• Profiles of History's Greatest Innovators, Founders, and Investors