저자: 미상 · 외국인
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버핏의 투자 원칙(저평가 매수, 평판 보호, 공포 시 기회 포착)과 버크셔 해서웨이 성장사를 다룬 교육용 다큐. 1965~2025년 버크셔 주당 시장가치 연평균 19.7%, S&P500 10.5%(배당 포함). 2026년 그렉 아벨 체제 전환 및 버핏의 명예회장 추대 소개. 특정 자산에 대한 가격 전망 발언 없음.
다듬은 글
A $1,000 investment in Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 would have grown to roughly $61 million by the end of 2025. There was no secret formula behind it. Buffett simply followed a few basic rules about where to put his money, what to avoid, and when to act. Then he kept following those rules through market crashes, corporate scandals, and even a deal that became one of the biggest mistakes of his career.
This is the story of how those rules turned a paper boy from Omaha into one of the world's most successful investors. Buffett was born on August 30th, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska. He grew up in a comfortable family. His grandfather ran a successful grocery store, while his father, Howard Buffett, worked as a stockbroker.
But when Warren was two, the Great Depression hit, and his father's financial situation changed with it. Howard eventually rebuilt his career. After watching people lose their savings in speculative investments, he focused on selling stocks that offered more protection instead of chasing quick gain.
Warren looked up to his father and paid close attention to the way he approached money. Channed at home, however, things were more difficult. His mother, Leila, was often harsh toward Warren and his sister, creating a tense environment. Warren became more withdrawn and started spending more time with things he could control.
He collected stamps, bottle caps, and license plates, sorting and organizing them carefully. Even as a child, he seemed drawn to numbers, patterns, and anything that could be measured. When Warren was 10, his father took him on a trip to New York. During the visit, Howard introduced him to Sidney Weinberg, the senior partner at Goldman Sachs.
Weinberg was one of the most respected figures on Wall Street and the meeting left an impression on Warren. That changed again when Howard Buffett was elected to Congress and the family moved to Washington, D.C. While Warren struggled with the move, his father was busy with his new political career while things at home remained difficult.
As a teenager, Warren began skipping school, shoplifting, and getting involved in small scams and pranks. But his father eventually stepped in. Howard told him that he could do better and Warren took those words seriously. He hated the idea of disappointing the man he admired most. But from that point on, Warren changed direction and began focusing his energy on something he could build for himself, making money.
He delivered newspapers and built a profitable route. He also placed pinball machines in barber shops and split the profits with the owners. He developed an early interest in horse racing statistics and used numbers to study the odds. By the time he finished high school, Warren had saved $5,000, worth about $50,000 today.
His father wanted him to attend college, so Warren enrolled at Wharton, but he was already more interested in investing than in following a conventional business career. After 2 years at Wharton, Warren transferred to the University of Nebraska where he finished his degree. Around this time, he read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and became fascinated by Graham's approach to investing.
Ben Graham had developed a method known as value investing. Instead of following market, he looked for companies whose shares were selling for less than what their underlying assets and businesses were worth. Warren wanted to study directly under Graham. He applied to Columbia Business School where Graham was teaching alongside David Dodd, the company author of Security Analysis.
Ambrose at Columbia, Buffett studied under both men. He later joined Graham's investment firm where he gained first-hand experience searching for deeply undervalued companies. One Buffett would later describe some of these businesses as cigar butts. They were often weak companies that could still offer one final opportunity because their shares were trading far below what the underlying assets were worth.
One of Buffett's first major tests came with Rockwood, a struggling Brooklyn chocolate company that owned a valuable stockpile of cocoa beans. Investor Jay Pritzker found a way to exchange shares for the cocoa without triggering a large tax bill. Graham saw a straightforward arbitrage opportunity. Buffett noticed something else.
Pritzker was willing to pay more to acquire additional shares, which suggested that he saw greater value in the company. Buffett decided to make a much larger bet than Graham normally would have recommended. He put a big chunk of his personal capital into Rockwood. The stock rose from $34 to $85, giving Buffett more than $13,000 in profit, or roughly $144,000 today.
It was an early sign that Buffett was learning something beyond Graham's rules. He was learning when to follow them and when to trust his own judgment. Hence, when Graham retired and closed his investment firm, Buffett had a clear path to a well-paid career on Wall Street. Instead, at 26, he returned to Omaha and started his own investment partnership.
Most of the initial money came from family and friends who trusted him with their savings. Now, Buffett had to prove that his approach could work without Graham behind him. He began looking for opportunities that larger investors had overlooked. One was National American, a Nebraska insurance company whose shares traded on the obscure pink sheets.
Now, despite its troubled past, Buffett saw something other investors had overlooked. Many of the company's shares were still held by farmers who believed they were worth very little because of the company's troubled past. Buffett traveled to Nebraska and bought shares directly from some of those farmers.
In certain cases, he paid as little as 30% of what he believed the stock was actually worth. He saw an opportunity in Sanborn Maps. The company's insurance mapping business was declining, but its investment portfolio was worth about $65 a share, while the stock traded for only $45. Buffett became convinced that the company was worth much more than the market price suggested.
He even raised money from his aunt, father, and mother to help increase his position and secure a seat on the board when the existing directors refused to release the value Buffett saw in the company's investments. He pushed for changes. Eventually, the board gave in and Buffett earned a 50% return.
But, not every investment was so straightforward. Dempster Mill, a Nebraska manufacturer of windmills and farm equipment, became a much bigger problem. The company was struggling with poor management and heavy debt. Buffett eventually turned to Charlie Munger for help. The Munger recommended new management, and Buffett brought in Harry Bottle
to restructure the company. But, the changes meant layoffs and closures, and the local reaction was severe. 100 employees were laid off, and Buffett eventually sold the company to a group of investors in 1963. Munger Buffett's partnership made about $2.3 million in profit on the investment. The experience affected him in a way the profit did not.
Ben Graham Dempster taught Buffett a harder lesson. A company could look cheap because its assets were valuable and still be a difficult business to own. Oh, and that lesson would soon become important in one of Buffett's biggest investments yet. Come to in 1964, American Express was hit by the infamous salad oil scandal
and its stock plunged. Munger Buffett looked beyond the scandal and focused on the businesses that were still working, especially its charge card and travelers check operations. He believed customers had not lost faith in the American Express brand. To test that idea, he watched how people were still using their cards in everyday life.
Then he made an unusually large bet. Munger Buffett partnership invested about $13 million in American Express, giving the partnership more than 5% of the company. The investment represented roughly 40% of the partnership's capital, making it the largest investment Buffett had made at the time. Munger, the stock recovered and Buffett eventually sold the position for a profit of about $20 million.
American Express showed Buffett that a company's value could come from something that did not appear clearly on its balance sheet, the strength of its brand and the loyalty of its customers. By 1965, Buffett's partnership had grown to $44 million. Then Then came Berkshire Hathaway. Munger, the company was a struggling New England textile manufacturer whose stock traded below the value of its assets.
That made it exactly the kind of cheap business Buffett had learned to look for. But the deal went wrong. Munger's after Berkshire's chairman, Seabury Stanton, went back on an agreement to buy Buffett's shares. Buffett decided to take control of the company instead. He eventually fired Stanton only to find himself in control of a business that was still losing money.
Buffett later called Berkshire the worst investment of his career. But he did not walk away from it. Instead, he gradually changed what Berkshire was. Charlie Munger helped point him in that direction through Blue Chip Stamps. Company collected money from customers before it had to pay out all of its obligations.
That money, known as float, could be invested while it remained in the business. Bond. This gave Buffett a powerful new way to think about Berkshire. Instead of relying only on the profits from one business, he could use cash generated by businesses to invest in other assets. In 1969, after 13 years of extraordinary returns, Buffett dissolved his original partnership
and retained a substantial personal stake in Berkshire. He was no longer simply looking for cheap stocks. He was building a company that could keep putting capital to work. Turns that change became even clearer in 1972 when Buffett and Munger bought See's Candies. It was not a struggling company selling below the value of its assets.
It was a strong business with a loyal customer base and the ability to raise prices without losing those customers. To believe for Buffett, that was a a different kind of value. He was beginning to move away from buying merely cheap businesses and toward buying great businesses at reasonable prices.
These would go on to generate billions of dollars in profits for Berkshire over the following decades. Around the same time, Wesco Financial gave Buffett another chance to apply the importance of keeping his word. And after a public announcement caused Wesco's stock price to fall, Buffett could have taken advantage of the lower price.
Instead, he agreed to pay $17 a share rather than the $11 price available in the market. The immediate profit would have been smaller, but Buffett kept the original commitment. Buffett chose to honor the commitment rather than take advantage of the lower market price. And the SEC investigated the complicated transactions, and the matter was eventually settled without an admission or denial of wrongdoing.
Blue Chip paid about $115,000 to affected shareholders. By then, Buffett had learned that trust was not just a personal quality. It could protect a business when things went wrong. That idea was tested again in 1991. Mondo Buffett had invested about $700 million in Salomon Brothers in 1987. Four years later, the firm was caught illegally manipulating Treasury bond auctions, putting his investment at risk.
Regulators were investigating, and the company was at risk of collapsing. Buffett stepped in as interim chairman and cooperated with regulators instead of trying to hide the company's problems. Downed Salomon survived the crisis, and Berkshire ultimately recovered its investment. By this point, his reputation had become part of the value of the businesses he controlled.
Mayans at reputation also gave Buffett access when Wall Street was in trouble. During the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs raised capital from Berkshire. Buffett invested $5 billion in preferred stock. He later made a similar $3 billion investment in General Electric. These were not ordinary stock purchases.
Buffett was providing capital when companies needed it most. While negotiating terms that gave Berkshire significant potential returns. Then in 2016, Berkshire began building a position in Apple after avoiding technology stocks for much of his career, Berkshire began building a position in Apple. The initial investment was about $1 billion and Apple eventually became one of Berkshire's largest and most profitable holdings.
Then by then, Buffett's approach had changed dramatically from the cigar butt investing he learned from Graham. He was no longer simply searching for stocks that looked cheap. He was looking for durable businesses that could keep producing cash and give him opportunities to reinvest it. On November 28th, 2023, Charlie Munger died at 99, just over a month before his 100th birthday.
Two men had worked together for more than six decades. Buffett called Munger the architect of Berkshire Hathaway and described himself as the general contractor. Plans by late 2025, it was preparing Berkshire for a future without him. He had sold about 2/3 of the company's Apple stake and reduced its bank holdings while Berkshire's cash and short-term investments had grown to roughly $382 billion.
At the company's annual meeting that year, Buffett announced that Greg Abel would become Berkshire's next CEO. The decision had been so private that Abel himself did not know until Buffett announced it. True dawn January 1st, 2026, after 60 years as CEO, Buffett officially stepped down. Though the company he left behind reflected the same approach he had followed for decades.
From 1965 through 2025, Berkshire's per-share market value compounded at 19.7% annually compared with 10.5% for the S&P 5 500 with dividends included. Come May 2026, Buffett was sitting in the audience at Berkshire's annual meeting instead of leading it from the stage. After six decades, he was watching Greg Abel lead the company he had built.
Abel had already taken over as Berkshire's CEO in January, making the annual meeting the first clear sign of Buffett's transition into the background. But the final step in that transition came a few months later. On September 18th, 2026, Buffett stepped down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and became chairman emeritus.
Howard G. Buffett was elected as the new chairman while Warren remained on the board. After all the acquisitions, market crashes, and billion-dollar investments, Buffett's approach still comes down to a few basic ideas. Buy businesses for less than they are worth. Protect your reputation. And when markets panic, look for opportunities instead of following the crowd.
There was no secret formula behind Buffett's fortune. The difficult part was following those principles consistently for six decades. So, after everything Buffett built, can anyone else follow the same simple rules and achieve the same kind of success?
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