원문 보기
1958 Warren Buffett buys a house in Omaha, Nebraska for $31,500. 65 years later, worth about $106 billion, he he still lives in it. And the house is not even the strangest number in his file. There is his salary, and there is what his company spends every year just to guard his front door. That comparison is coming.
It is this whole video in one line. Every person on this list could buy almost anything on Earth. A mansion on every coast, a jet for every day of the week. And almost none of them did. They wore the same shoes for a decade. They cut their own hair. One of them drove the same pickup until the day he died.
One was, for a few days, the richest person in the world and still ate lunch in the company cafeteria. And one gave away $8 billion and hid it for 15 years. Why should that matter to you? Because the habit that protected these fortunes is the same habit that decides whether an ordinary paycheck ever turns into anything at all.
Eight of them. Counting down from eight to one. And at number one, you will hear the answer in the man's own words. Written in a letter to his shareholders. Number eight. Michael Bloomberg. In 1981, after 15 years at the investment bank Salomon Brothers, he was fired. He was 39. He walked out with a $10 million payout.
The week he was fired, he ordered his wife a sable coat. Then he did something far less glamorous. He put $4 million of that payout into a company that sold data to traders. Bloomberg LP, 15 years later, he was a billionaire. So, what does a man who built a financial data empire actually spend his money on?
Watch his feet. In September 2010, the New York Post reported that the billionaire mayor of New York City owned exactly two pairs of work shoes. The same two for 10 years. His spokesman confirmed it. Quote, "One day he'll wear one, the next the other. And when they get worn down, he has them resoled." A shoe salesman told the post they looked like a classic Italian leather loafer, around $330 a pair.
And when the mayor himself was asked about a backup pair, he said, "I think for security reasons, I really cannot talk about my shoes." He never bought cheap shoes. He bought good ones and kept them. That is the first pattern on this list, and you will see it again. Not less, longer. Number seven. Amancio Ortega.
You may not know the name. You know the store he co-founded Inditex, the company behind Zara. In August 2017, his fortune reached $85 billion, just past Bill Gates at 84.9. For a few days, a man many people have never heard of was the richest person in the world. Now go back to 2001. The day Inditex first sold shares to the public, Ortega went to work.
He watched the news on television for about 15 minutes, long enough to find out he had just earned $6 billion, and then he went to lunch in the company cafeteria. So where did he eat the next day? The same place. Reporting on him says he still eats with his employees in the company cafeteria, goes to the same local coffee shop, and lives with his wife in a discreet apartment building.
He never had his own office, no desk, no desktop computer. He ran the company standing with his designers in the design room of Zara Woman, the flagship line. Even his clothes are a routine. Blue blazer, white shirt, gray trousers, no tie. The $6 billion lunch was not a stunt. The fortune changed. The routine did not.
Number six, David Cheriton. In 1998, on his own front porch, this Stanford professor heard two students pitch a project. He and his business partner, Andy Bechtolsheim, each wrote them a check. $100,000 a piece. The students were Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The project became Google. By 2025, Cheriton's net worth was estimated at $17.7 billion.
So So what does a man who wrote one of Google's first checks drive to work? A 1986 Volkswagen Vanagon. The same van he had before the money arrived. He lives in the same Palo Alto home he has owned for about 40 years. And his barber is himself. His explanation, quote, "It's not that I can't fathom a haircut, it's just easy to do myself and it takes less time." Asked once for his latest splurge, the best he could name was a Honda Odyssey minivan
for the kids. And about the mansions around him, he told the Edmonton Journal, "These people who build houses with 13 bathrooms and so on, there's something wrong with them." Same van, same house, same barber. $17.7 billion. Number five, Sam Walton. He co-founded Walmart. And from 1982 to 1988, Forbes ranked him the richest person in the United States.
In 1979, the same year Walmart reached a billion dollars in sales, he bought himself a new vehicle, a red and white Ford F-150 custom pickup with a box in the bed for his dogs. He drove that truck until he died in 1992 at 74. He answered the obvious question himself in his autobiography, quote, "Why do I drive a pickup truck?
What am I supposed to to my dogs around in? A Rolls-Royce. Today that pickup sits in the Walmart Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas in the building that was once Walton's five and dime. Meticulously reassembled for display. If this countdown is doing something for you, tap like and subscribe so the next story like this one finds you.
Number four. Ingvar Kamprad. He founded IKEA in 1943 as a 17-year-old. When he died in January 2018 at 91, Bloomberg estimated his fortune at $58.7 billion. He the eighth richest person in the world. For two decades, he drove a 1993 Volvo 240 GL. He only gave it up when someone persuaded him it had become too dangerous to drive.
He flew economy. He stayed in budget hotels. He was known for recycling tea bags and for taking home the little packets of salt and pepper from restaurants. And then there was the haircut. In 2008, he paid about $27 for a haircut in the Netherlands and told a Swedish newspaper it was more than he liked to spend.
His words, "Normally, I try to get my haircut when I'm in a developing country. Last time it was in Vietnam." In Appenzell, Gais, the Swiss village where he lived for decades, he was known as Uncle Scrooge and the miser. But there was a method in it. The New York Times reported that his cut-rate flights, hotels, and meals were meant as an example to his executives who were expected to follow suit and quote, "To write on both sides of a piece of paper." The habit was not only his, it was the company's.
Number three. Charlie Munger. For decades, he was Warren Buffett's business partner. He died in November 2023 at 99, a billionaire. And for about 70 years, he lived in the same California house. Not because he never thought about moving. He did. That is the interesting part. In an interview with CNBC's Becky Quick that aired two days after his death, he said he and Buffett had both considered bigger and better houses.
Quote, I had a huge number of children. So, it was justifiable even. And I still decided not to live a life where I look like the Duke of Westchester or something. He had watched rich friends build, in his words, really fancy houses. His verdict, in practically every case, they make the person less happy, not happier.
His summary, I did it on purpose. The reason was not the money. It was his nine children. I didn't think it would be good for the children. Number two, Chuck Feeney. And he is the one who takes this pattern all the way to the end. Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers, airport shops selling perfume, cigarettes, and liquor duty free to American servicemen coming home from overseas.
The business grew. He became a billionaire. Homes from New York to Honolulu to the Riviera. Limousines. Then, in 1982, he set up a foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, and began giving his fortune away. Quietly. Anonymously. His name on nothing. For 15 years, almost nobody knew. In 1996, he sold his stake in the company to the luxury group LVMH.
A dispute with his partners over that sale was heading to court, and his secret was going to come out with it. So, he got there first. He called the New York Times, January 23rd, 1997. The headline read, he gave away $600 million, and no one knew. He did not stop at $600 million. His foundation made grants of more than $8 billion.
The Times reported that his giving funded more than 1,000 buildings on five continents, and his name does not appear on even one. His own life went the other way. He gave up the homes. He sold the limousines. For decades, he lived with his wife in a rented two-bedroom apartment. He took the bus and the subway.
He flew coach. He wore a cheap watch and carried his papers in plastic bags instead of a briefcase. Chuck Feeney died in San Francisco in October 2023 at 92. Forbes put his net worth at about $2 million. $8 billion given away. About $2 million left. Bill Gates said Feeney was living the giving pledge long before we launched it.
And one of the people who launched that pledge is number one. Number one. Warren Buffett. He was chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway from 1970 through the end of 2025. Back to the house from the start. Five bedrooms in central Omaha. Built in 1921. Bought in 1958 for $31,500. A five-minute drive from the office.
On that drive, he usually stopped at McDonald's. Two sausage patties, $2.61. A sausage, egg, and cheese, $2.95. Or a bacon, egg, and cheese, $3.17. And until 2020, he carried a $20 flip phone. Now, the number I promised you at the very start. Berkshire's own proxy statement says Buffett's annual compensation was $100,000 for more than 40 years.
No bonus. No stock. In 2025, Berkshire spent $289,000 $488,000 on his personal and home security. Nearly three times his salary. His successor, Greg Abel, was paid a salary of $22 million for 2025. The man who built the company took less than half of 1% of that. So, why? Why would a man worth over $100 billion dollars the house, the breakfast, and the salary.
He answered it himself in his 2010 letter to shareholders, quote, "The third best investment I ever made was the purchase of my home. Though I would have made far more money had I instead rented and used the purchase money to buy stocks. The two best investments were wedding rings." He admits the house lost to the stock market.
He kept it anyway because the price was never the point. For the $31,500 he wrote, "My family and I gained 52 years of terrific memories with more to come." And when he pledged more than 99% of his wealth to philanthropy, he wrote the sentence that ties this entire list together, quote, "This pledge will leave my lifestyle untouched." Untouched.
That is the answer. None of these eight got rich by being cheap. The fortunes came from IKEA and Zara, from Google and Walmart, from financial data and duty-free shops. What they share is one decision. Each of them picked a life that was enough. A house, a truck, two pairs of shoes, a haircut, and then refused to let the fortune renegotiate it.
Everything above that line was free to grow or to be given away. Pick what is enough, then stop renegotiating it. And that is the one part of this you can copy on any income. The line was the only thing any of them ever truly controlled, which leads a harder question. If a fixed line kept billionaires rich, what does the same line do for an ordinary paycheck over 40 years? That story is on your screen right now.
Comments 0