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An elderly man behind the wheel of a Cadillac counts the loose change he has in a small cup. This is Warren Buffett, the tenth richest person on the planet and those coins are his breakfast. He lives in a house he bought long before his first billion and has never moved from it. His two assistants earn 56 times more than him, and for his own postage stamps he writes a check to his own company.
And we'll finish with how a man who saves on stamps gave away $6 billion in a single day. Welcome to the channel for the very rich. Luxury life. The breakfast that the bag chooses. This breakfast has three prices, and which one you pay is decided by the bag. Every morning, while Warren Buffett shaves, he tells his wife Astrid what he wants and she puts exactly the required coins into a paper cup and the cup waits for him in the cup holder of the Cadillac.
2.61 cents is two sausage burgers that he puts together himself in a sandwich and that's the order for a morning when he's not feeling too rich. 2.95 is a McMuffin with egg and cheese, and that was precisely the one he ordered on camera from HBO because the market had fallen that morning. 3.17 is a cake with bacon, egg and cheese and that's for the day he feels rich.
He says it from the driver's seat , in one breath and you can see on his face that for him that rule is as normal as the seat belt. It takes a few minutes to drive from his house to the office . McDonald's is right on the road, and he himself calls it one of the advantages of the route. He takes his lunch to his office, eats at his desk, and accompanies it with a Coca-Cola; this is how the day begins for a man whom Bloomberg ranks tenth among the richest people on the planet.
To be honest, I did the math. The difference between his poor morning and his rich morning is 56 cents. Those were McDonald's prices in 2017 when this was filmed . Since then prices have risen, but the car, according to reports this year, is the same. The house on Farnam Street. Buffett himself placed this house in third place among the best investments of his life, and the first two places are not occupied by stocks.
He bought it in 1958 at the age of 28 and at first he and his wife Susan simply rented it. They then paid $31,500 for it. In today's money that's a little over 300,000, the price of an average apartment. The house is on Farnam Street, it's over 100 years old, it's stuccoed by outside and from there it's a short drive to the house where Buffett grew up, a few blocks to the store where his grandfather traded and his mother-in- law lived very close by.
He didn't even leave his own neighborhood. I already knew how to save money before this address. When their first daughter was born in a rented apartment, they didn't buy a crib, and the baby, if biographers are to be believed, slept in a drawer that had been taken out of a dresser. What happens next never happens.
A man becomes one of the 10 richest people on the planet and doesn't move anywhere. 68 years old, same address, same route to work. The security for this house is paid for by Berkshire and costs almost 10 times more per year than the house cost when it was purchased. At the same time, according to real estate agents, the house is valued at a figure that, by the standards of this channel, is not even laughable, a little over a million.
At first I thought it was a typo. He did have a second house. In the 1970s he bought a house overlooking the ocean in Laguna Beach, California. The family lived there for decades and then put it up for sale for $11 million . It was sold in 2018 for 7.5 million and since then the Omaha house has been the only one.
At a shareholders' meeting, he was once asked about this and replied that beyond a certain point, the standard of living and the cost of living cease to be related. Six or eight houses would have only complicated his life and he wouldn't have been any happier. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote that the purchase gave the family more than 50 years of wonderful memories, and then honestly added that he would have earned much more if he had rented the house and invested the money in stocks.
And now the first two places. According to him, those are occupied by two wedding rings. Three shares and a sister. Warren Buffett, at age 11, buys three shares of an oil company for himself and another three for his older sister and very soon begins to regret it. Pay $38.25 for each one. It's all their savings, and within a few weeks the stocks fall by almost a third.
And his sister, according to his own recollections, reminds him every day on his way to school what he did with his money. The boy holds on, waits for the price to recover and leave him a little profit, and then sells. And then he watches as those same shares rise five times above the price he sold them for.
The savings, by the way, were real. He started trading at the age of 6. He would take packets of Coca-Cola from his grandfather, who owned a grocery store, and go around to the neighbors with them, selling them by the bottle and keeping a few cents from each packet . He was born in Omaha in 1930, a year after the Great Depression hit the United States.
His father lost his job at the bank and opened his own stock sales office. And at home, money was discussed the way time is discussed in other families. The boy grew up quiet, reading books from his father's library, collecting stamps and bottle caps, and, most importantly, counting them. Biographers believe that numbers gave him an order he lacked.
Then his father was elected to Congress, the family moved to Washington, and the teenager went off the rails. He skipped school, stole golf balls and merchandise from a department store until his father told him a single sentence: that he was capable of more. From that moment on, he focused solely on making money.
He delivered two newspapers at the same time, the morning one and its competitor, and at 14 he earned more than his teachers. With that money, he and a friend bought a used pinball machine, put it in a barbershop, and shared the takings with the owner. Then he put up several more and with the money from the newspapers he bought a farm in Nebraska, while still a schoolboy, and rented it out.
When he finished school he had $5,000, about $50,000 in today's money , and he talked about those three shares for the rest of his life. "It's been 75 years," he once said, "and I still don't know what the market will do tomorrow. That's not my game." The registration. About 22,500 kilometers, that's what the odometer of his Lincoln showed after 5 years and for his commute that's even a lot.
He drives himself, without a chauffeur, and said that he travels about 5,600 kilometers a year , which the average American does in about 3 months. For many years it was a light gold Lincoln Town Car from the early 2000s and its license plate had only one word, thrifty. In the spring of 2006, a Cadillac was purchased, and the Lincoln went up for auction online, and they paid $73,200 for a used car with that mileage .
The money went to a fund to help girls. The license plate was taken by the buyer along with the car, and Buffett himself promised to put on a chauffeur's hat and personally drive the winner from Omaha airport to his purchase. I had previously auctioned personal items for that fund. A few years earlier, his old wallet was sold at auction for more than 200,000.
The Cadillac was very ordinary and 8 years later its mileage was barely greater than that of the Lincoln. His daughter Susie buys the cars for him. She said that she is the one who tells her father when his car becomes unpresentable and that time he bought her a new Cadillac with hail marks on the body.
Those are sold at a discount. According to the latest reports, he's still driving it and the dents, judging from the pictures, haven't been fixed by anyone. $100 and seven relatives. Buffett's first fund had no office, no secretary, no sign, and most of the people he proposed investing to refused. He was 25 years old, had just returned from New York to Omaha because his mentor Benjamin Graham had closed his firm and retired, and instead of a good position on Wall Street, Buffett opened his own company in the bedroom of a rented house.
He signed the checks himself, filled out the tax returns himself, and received the shares himself. Potential customers would arrive, see a young man who looked about 18 years old, and leave. He received money from seven people, almost all of them relatives. His sister, his aunt, his father-in-law. In total, about $105,000 was raised, and of that, Buffett's own money was exactly $100.
The conditions he offered were such that anyone would have signed them. No management fee. The first 6% of the annual profit was kept entirely by the partners, and Buffett received a quarter of everything above that threshold. And if he didn't pass, he received nothing. In this way, a man with $100, year after year, became the owner of an ever- increasing share of the common fund.
His share stayed in the fund and worked alongside other people's money. Following Graham's method, he looked for companies whose stock value was less than the money they had in their accounts, and he himself called those stocks cigarette butts. Someone threw it away, but there's still enough for a free puff.
And the result was such that they couldn't believe it. Three times faster than the market, year after year, and not a single year with losses. In the year the entire market collapsed, their company grew anyway. By 1962, his own share exceeded one million. He was 32 years old. He closed that fund in 1969, at its peak.
He told the partners that the fund had become too big for small deals, that the market valued companies at the limit and that he wasn't going to lower the bar for the business. He was 39 years old and already had about 25 million dollars of his own. To be honest, what I like most about this story is not the profitability, but the checks.
A man who half a century later will lead a company worth a billion, signs them himself, on a desk in his own bedroom. The people who came to hate him. A windmill factory in Nebraska was worth less on the stock market than the iron from its own workshops, and for Buffett it was just another cigarette butt.
Demster Mill manufactured windmills and irrigation systems in Beatriz, a town of 10,000 people where everyone knows each other. The business was doing badly, but there were many assets and Buffett bought shares until he gained control. He put a fifth of all the company's money into it, and then it was discovered what the bad business was made of .
Managers ordered parts and assembled mills for a market where nobody was buying them. Debts were piling up and the banks were already preparing to take over the warehouses and close the factory. For a man who managed his own family's money, that meant losing everything. He called a well-known lawyer from California, the [musician] he had met at a dinner in Omaha a couple of years earlier.
The lawyer's name was Charlie Munger, and this is the first time he has appeared in Berkshire's history. Munger later recounted that conversation like this: "Warren didn't understand anything about running a factory like this. He bought it only because it was cheap and asked, 'What do you do? Who can you find to help me?'" "I have," Munger replied, "just the man you need." He was an accountant named Harry Botol, and Buffett hired him on the spot.
Botol laid off hundreds of workers, sold the equipment and closed five branches, and the factory became profitable again. Buffett was preparing to sell it to another buyer and exit the story with a profit, and then the people took to the streets. The residents of Beatriz organized a fundraiser, collected $3 million from their own pockets, $300 per resident if you count babies, and bought Buffett's factory.
He earned about 2 million from this and left with the reputation of a man who destroys companies. What he did today is politely called activist investing, but back then it was called corporate takeover. The operation didn't hurt him, the hatred hurt him. Deep down, he believed the factory was there and expected them to thank him.
Tanks with seawater. There was no soybean oil in those tanks, there was seawater, and the market decided that the company was finished. The company was American Express. In addition to cards and traveler's checks, it had a discreet division that issued receipts for merchandise stored in warehouses, and banks accepted those receipts as collateral for loans.
A merchant named Anthony De Angelis filled his water tanks, poured some oil on top, deceived the inspectors, obtained receipts for oil that did not exist, and used them to borrow hundreds of millions from the banks. In 1963, the scheme imploded. The banks went to American Express to get their money back.
It was about 60 million dollars and the company's shares fell by half. Buffett did what anyone in Omaha could do. He toured the city's restaurants and shops. He stood by the register and watched to see if people were still paying with their American Express cards, and people were paying as if nothing was wrong.
He asked at the banks if they accepted the company's traveler's checks, and they did . The scandal was in only one division, while the company was making money with the cards and the checks and that business hadn't even heard about the tanks. He then put about $13 million into American Express stock, almost 40% of all the money in his company.
In a single company that the entire stock market was burying. Then came a dispute. The company's president, Howard Clark, wanted to pay the banks those 60 million voluntarily, although lawyers said that in court the company would probably have gotten away with it and many shareholders demanded to go to trial.
Buffett wrote to Clark that he was in favor of paying. It's expensive now, but the company will remain one you can trust for decades to come. The banks were paid. In two years the stocks returned to the point from which they had fallen and continued to rise. And that was his first transaction in which he paid for a company's reputation.
American Express had almost no warehouses or machines. The salary that no one touched in 40 years. By 2025, the company had paid him $389,488. And most of that sum is not salary at all. Buffett's salary at Berkshire has been the same for more than 40 years. $100,000 a year. He himself asked that they not touch him.
It never went up. It never came with bonuses or stock packages, which are usually what make up the income of executives at his level in the music industry. And everything above 100,000 in the report is security, both personal and home security. The company pays for it and honestly records it as part of its income.
Next to it are the figures for the people who work under his orders. Greg Abel and Ajit Jain each received 22 million for that same year . That is, each one 56 times more than the man who built this entire system. And both sums were set by Buffett himself. She counts even the little things. Sometimes he asks company employees to do things for his personal matters.
Or the company pays for his mail and personal calls and therefore issues him a check for an amount equal to or greater than the expenses . In 2017 that check was for $50,000. And CNBC did a separate report on it. The billionaire who pays for his own postage stamps. Only one whim was allowed in the air.
For years Buffett criticized executives who fly on corporate planes. And then, around the time he himself became a multimillionaire, Berkshire bought such a plane, called it the indefensible, a jab that occurred to his partner, and after a few years of flying renamed it the indispensable. Then Berkshire bought a company that sells shares in private jets.
He sold his plane and since then flies as an ordinary co-owner, with standard fares and pays every bill himself, to a company that, coincidentally, belongs to him. According to the press, he gets his hair cut by the same barber in his own building, for $18. One eighth of a dollar. $11.50 per share. That's what they promised him verbally, and he didn't receive it.
Berkshire Hathaway, in the early 1960s, is a loss-making textile factory in New Bedford, run by a man named Seabury Stanton. Buffett started buying his stocks with the same logic as the cigarette butt. For each share they demanded half of what the company had in cash in its accounts and merchandise in its warehouses.
The factory was closing workshops, and with the money freed up, it was buying back its own shares from anyone who wanted to sell, and he was counting on waiting for the next buyback and coming out with a small profit. Stanton invited him to a meeting, proposed to buy his entire package and they agreed on 11 and a half.
Then the written offer arrived. 11 and 3/8, one eighth of a dollar less than agreed and that eighth was enough. Buffett flew into a rage and decided that now he would not sell his stake, but would buy the entire company. He bought up his stock until he became the main owner. In May 1965 his company took control and Stanton left .
And when, a few years later, the company closed and the partners could take their money or shares, the shares he kept and recommended to others were precisely these. He later called it the dumbest stock purchase of his life. The textile industry suffered losses for another 20 years. In 1985, the last looms were stopped and, as he himself acknowledged, if it hadn't been for that eighth one, he would have simply sold the package and forgotten about the factory.
I did the math. One-eighth of a dollar is 12 and a half cents, and a trillion-dollar company exists because of them. He kept the factory shell and this is what he put inside. 15 minutes a year. Once a year, the owner of an insurance company in Omaha would get angry with the inspectors for exactly 15 minutes, and during those 15 minutes he was prepared to sell everything.
His name was Jack Ringwalt. The company was called National Indemnity and it insured what everyone else refused to do. Circus performers, lion tamers, people from the strangest professions, because he believed there are no bad risks, only bad prices. According to Buffett's own account, a mutual acquaintance promised to call him during his next outburst.
They called in February 1967. Ringwalt arrived, and he was also late for his own operation. I was looking for a place to park next to a parking meter that still had time paid for. Buffett didn't bother studying the financial statements or haggling, and in a quarter of an hour, the company was sold to Berkshire for $8,600,000.
Buffett, in my opinion, simply recognized a man who saves money on parking the day he sells his business for $8 million. Along with the office, Buffett received $19 million of other people's money, more than double what he paid, and this is how it works. An insurance company collects premiums today and pays claims later, sometimes years later, and all that time the money is in its possession.
If you don't lose money on the insurance itself, it's a free loan that no one demands you pay back. If he wins, then people will even pay him to hold their money. Buffett invested that money in stocks, then in entire companies. The companies were profitable. With the profits he bought new insurance companies, and with them came new other people's money.
It is the hidden engine of all the fortune and almost no one talks about it, because talking about Coca-Cola is more interesting. Free lending grew for decades. He bought Geico, then the reinsurer General Re, and by the 1920s there was more than $100 billion of other people's money inside Berkshire.
Because of them, he did n't pay a single cent in interest for most years. Five cans a day. "He eats Oreo cookies for breakfast," Bill Gates said about his guest. And that's perhaps the most harmless thing that is known about their diet. Buffett, as he himself explained, built his diet using data from the insurance business.
In an interview with Fortune magazine, he said that he studied the tables that insurance companies use to calculate how long each person will live. He saw that the least likely to die are 6- year-old children and decided to eat like a 6- year-old child. He gave the calculations right there. A quarter of all your daily calories come from Coca-Cola, no less than five cans.
The regular one during the day, the cherry one towards the evening, and jokes that he himself is a quarter of Coca-Cola. He often has lunch at Dairy Queen, which belongs to Berkshire, a chili and cheese hot dog and cherry and nut ice cream, snacks on peanut and chocolate brittle from his own See's store and chips.
Gates added that the rest of the time his guest ate hamburgers, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. "I'd rather be happy with Coca-Cola and hot dogs," Buffett said, "than unhappy because of broccoli." He and Gates even did a shift at Dairy Queen during a shareholders' meeting and handed out ice cream to the attendees.
In meetings, this became a fixed number. In his 2023 letter, he boasted that See's kiosk at the meeting sold 11 tons of candy in two days , sometimes 10-20 per minute, and that candy was the only plausible explanation for him being 92 and Munger 99. At the 2025 meeting, he sat on stage with two cans of Coca-Cola and a box of chocolates and said he had disproven all predictions.
And he and Charlie, he added, had stayed in shape because they never played sports. Not a single action in 30 years. Not a single one. Of the 400 million Coca-Cola shares that Berkshire bought in the late 1980s, it has not sold a single one, and it is the most profitable of all its investments. For years Munger pushed him in that direction.
"Stop picking up cigarette butts, buy a business that can grow for decades and pay a fair price for it ." The proof appeared as early as the 1970s when they bought the See's candy factory for a price that Buffett thought was crazy. The factory needed minimal equipment, raised the prices of its boxes every year, customers kept coming, and money flowed out like water from an open tap.
From then on, he knew that paying more for something good is cheaper than paying less for something bad. The sweetest bet he made came after the stock market crash of 1987. For months Berkshire bought shares of Coca-Cola, about a third of the entire daily trading volume of those shares, and didn't tell anyone.
The commission that oversees the stock exchange, as an exception, allowed him not to disclose the purchases for more than a year because his name alone would have moved the price. That cost about $1.3 billion. By the fall of 2026, that stake was worth about 30 billion, meaning it had increased more than 20 times.
But that's not even the main point. Each year Coca-Cola transfers a portion of its profits to its owners, and Berkshire's stake receives almost $850 million of those payments each year, for more than 30 consecutive years and increasing every year. With those payments alone, the purchase has been paid off many times over.
I had not spoken to the company's boss, Roberto Goizueta, even once before the purchase. He read the annual report and knew the business itself from the inside, at five cans a day. What has he been doing all these years? "I earned most of my money after I turned 60," he says, and it sounds like flirting until you look at the figures.
He became a multimillionaire at 56, and from then on, the same percentages that previously trickled down on millions began to trickle down on billions. In its 60 years of management, Berkshire's shares grew on average twice as fast as the entire US market, without a single lost decade. $1,000 invested in it in 1965 would have been worth more than $55 million by 2026 .
A share that used to cost him $19 now costs three-quarters of a million, more than the house where his former director lives. And here the Farnam Street house returns to the story because it is precisely the answer to the main question. How did a man who saves on stamps end up among the 10 richest? He lived on 100,000 a year.
He never had to sell a share to pay for a mansion or a yacht, and his stake in the company remained intact and grew on its own while he was busy with a can of Coca-Cola, a stack of newspapers, and a deck of cards. One of the few times she paid with Berkshire Hathaway stock she calls the worst deal of her life, a Maine shoe company for which she handed over shares in the 1990s.
It lost all its value and the shares she gave up would have been worth many billions by 2026. And what makes it the worst is precisely the payment in shares. What have you been doing all these years? Seen from the outside, it seems like nothing. He doesn't get up early and says he doesn't want to be at work at 4 in the morning.
She goes to bed around 11 and confesses that she loves to sleep. Reading occupies most of his day. Five newspapers a day, on paper, in his hands and hundreds of annual reports a year, only from companies that he, as he himself puts it, is able to understand. He keeps his schedule almost empty. They don't hold work meetings and a significant part of their success is explained by the fact that they think a lot.
For years there was no computer on his desk. He used a keypad phone right up until the moment Berkshire was already buying a stake in Apple. And then Tim Cook gave him an iPhone and he said he uses the iPhone as a phone. The headquarters is a rented floor in an Omaha building where he has worked for over 60 years.
And in that plant, 26 people run a company that has about 400,000 employees. Those who have been inside describe a small desk, stacks of annual reports, a couple of chairs for visitors, and the blinds drawn. The friend from the airport. It was Buffett who offered to pay for lunch at a McDonald's in Hong Kong and took coupons out of his pocket.
Bill Gates mentioned it in one of his annual letters. They were traveling together, they went into a McDonald's, Buffett offered to pay and took out discount coupons and Gates' wife found a photograph of that moment and Gates joked with him and called him a spendthrift. They had been friends since the early 1990s, and that friendship was based on things that money can't buy.
Gates wrote that every time he arrived by plane in Omaha, Buffett would personally drive his Cadillac to the airport to meet him , without a chauffeur or assistant. Gates called it a small gesture that meant a great deal to him. The second pillar is the bridge. It's the only hobby Buffett takes seriously.
Professional bridge player Sharon Osberg plays with him online three or four times a week and says she spends about 8 hours a week playing cards. According to her, Gates analyzes the game as a scientific problem, while Buffett plays by intuition and learns quickly from his mistakes. After the shareholders' meeting in Omaha, for years these two would sit at a separate table and play a game, and Buffett would compare investing to bridge.
Both games punish the player who tries to play every hand. And the third pillar is the money he gives away. In 2010, along with Gates and his then- wife, he founded the Giving Pledge, the commitment to give, and promised to give away more than 99% of his fortune. And throughout his life, according to Forbes' calculations , he has given away more than $60 billion, almost all of it in Berkshire Hathaway stock.
Of that amount, more than 40 billion went to the Gates Foundation, to the friend he was going to meet at the airport. In July 2026, he gave away another 6 billion. The Gates Foundation was not on the list of beneficiaries, for the first time in 20 years. We'll come back to that list. The last letter.
He stopped talking to the airport friend, and he said so himself, in March 2026, live on CNBC. It happened after Gates' name appeared in the published documents of the Epstein case. Buffett said he hadn't spoken to him since all of this came to light, that he didn't want to know too much because he could be called as a witness, and that until everything was cleared up, there was no point in talking much.
And in July, when he gave away those same 6 billion, every last cent went to four family foundations. The foundation named after his first wife, and the foundations of his daughter and his two sons. He simply did not send money to the Gates Foundation , and, according to the press, he was waiting for lawyers to verify what links the foundation had with Epstein.
By then he had already handed over command, and he did so in such a way that not even his successor knew it. May 2025, the Omaha stadium is full. A question-and-answer session lasting several hours comes to an end. And Buffett says the time has come. By the end of the year, the company should be taken over by his long- time deputy, and he will communicate this to the board of directors as his recommendation.
Only his children knew beforehand. The successor was sitting next to him on the stage, and found out at the same time as the audience. At the opening of the stock market session, Berkshire shares fell. The entire previous year the market had tried to guess what he was up to. He sold. He reduced his stake in Apple by about two-thirds.
It sold bank shares it had held for decades, and by the end of 2025 the company had nearly $400 billion in cash. Everyone interpreted it as a prediction of collapse, but it wasn't a prediction, it was an inheritance. He wanted his successor to start with more money in hand than any director in history.
The partner with whom he worked for more than half a century and with whom he never argued died a year and a half before that meeting, a month before his 100th birthday, and Buffett said that without him Berkshire could not have been built. The partner was the architect, and he was merely the general contractor.
In November 2025, Buffett wrote his last letter to shareholders and said he was stepping back from the spotlight. In it he also wrote that greatness is not achieved with a mountain of money, nor with noisy fame, nor with great power. On January 1, 60 years after his company took control of a loss-making textile factory, his term ended.
In May 2026, the Omaha stadium was full again, but he wasn't on stage. He was sitting in the audience wearing a purple sweater and watching another man conduct his company's board meeting. The machine he had built worked without him and that was exactly how it had been conceived, and the walk from that stadium to the house on Farnam Street is the same few minutes as it was 60 years ago.
$31,500 for the house. 143 billion for never having moved from it. Write in the comments everything you think about this and subscribe to the channel for the richest. Here we talk about luxury, wealth and the lives of the most influential people on the planet. Thank you for watching the video, and now check out our previous episodes that have already appeared on your screen.
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