I respect Buffett greatly on a professional level, and think it's the height of arrogance to believe any one of us personally has the moral right to decide which level of lawful activity becomes turpitudinous greed.
THAT SAID...
My uncle (he's 98) had a passing acquaintance with Buffett during their overlap at Penn, and in the one econ class they shared, he remarked having heard Buffett say in almost salivating eagerness as he rubbed his hands that if only there could be another Great Depression, he would make a killing. The dude has value investing in his DNA beyond anything else, I truly believe. But he's argued for changing complex and unfair taxation, and always been a good citizen as far as I can tell. I think if all of Wall Street were like him, the world would be a much better place.
People with a lot less economic knowledge than Buffet still understand that another Depression could easily render them jobless and unable to pay a mortgage on a cheaper house. Wishing for a housing market downturn is not the same as a widescale GDP pullback.
With $150 billion dollars he could have done a lot more than "argue for" changing taxation. If he had spent that money actively fighting for a better system, maybe that'd be worth something. To sit back on your billions and say "aw shucks, this really shouldn't be possible" is not much of an effort.
Edit: Some people seem to be misunderstanding me. I'm saying if he thought taxation was unequal or thought wealth inequality was a problem, he could have used his wealth specifically to fight against billionaires like himself, not just give money towards generic charitable causes.
It seems buffet has taken “the giving pledge” along with Bill Gates and others. “More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death.” - https://www.givingpledge.org/pledger/warren-buffett/
I was responding to a comment that defended Buffet by saying he "argued for changing complex and unfair taxation". I'm saying if you have billions that could be spent on taking tangible action to change such taxation, simply "arguing for" changing it is not very impressive.
> if you have billions that could be spent on taking tangible action to change such taxation
Do you have evidence he didn’t try? He’s been a prolific (albeit measured) donor to candidates who have pushed for this [1].
From what I can tell, Buffett enjoyed making money. He outsourced his philanthropy to Bill & Melinda Gates. Their focus has tended to be global poverty.
Those numbers are a pittance relative to his wealth. He could have established a foundation and given it hundreds of millions of dollars specifically to push for a more equitable taxation system. He did not do that.
He turned 95 years old on August 30. He was 75 when he began giving away his fortune, announcing plans in June 2006 to give away the bulk of his wealth to five foundations, primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He changed his will in 2024, designating 99.5% of his remaining fortune after his death to a charitable trust overseen by his three children and also announcing in June 2024 that donations to the Gates Foundation would cease upon his death.
Just think, if that charitable trust is structured correctly, it could be used to pay a modest believable "administration" salary to many many generations of offspring all while paying out some token pittances to make the whole thing seem genuine.
That article seems to accurately describe the charitable activities of Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, but it's worth pointing out that Howard G. and Susan Buffett have charitable foundations of their own that seem to have a more conventional philanthropic approach, one that may perhaps be more amenable to a clearer focus on getting the right outcomes. It seems unwarranted to assume that the description in the article applies to the Buffett children's activities as a whole.
I think you're referring to Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. I'm not aware of any that exist.
Banks do not store their deposits in a cash vault. They loan it out (except for a reserve percentage), and charge interest on the loan. That's how they make money. That's why they offer free checking - so they can loan your money out and charge interest. They will even pay you to deposit your money, so they can loan it out and make money on it.
Wealthy people know how to make money, which means putting the money to productive use creating goods and services that people want. If that money is confiscated from them, there's that much less money creating goods and services people want.
A man who built what he loves and produced so much surplus value for the rest of us to enjoy (read: profit) is _exactly_ a hero. I’m sure I could find ways critique him, but not in the context of celebrating his career.
Art vs artist debate is tired, as is celebrity distance appraisal. If you want to know if someone is good or bad your best bet (still iffy) is to ask their kids or spouse. That’s he’s skilled at the financial game is obvious. Whether that’s valuable is a philosophical question that has little to do with Warren Buffet.
Hey, with all the de-industrializing Europe has been doing, everything is now made in China and the only decision western civilization has to make is how do we equally distribute those goods. I mean why do absolutely anything if they just do it China? You can just demand your share of the goods as a human right. They can't shut you down, you're the heroic consumer after all without which the economy wouldn't exist. /s
I don't want a society where you have to be a hero to produce mass benefit to others. I want a society where greedy people feel like they have to serve the needs and wants of others to fulfill their greed.
I don't know to what extent Buffet does it. Nor does our current quasi-fascist society where the government is highly embedded with industry and regulating who is the winner and who is the loser and then taxing/inflating the working class to make sure they stay afloat.
But in the idealistic version of America, it is supposed to be a place where becoming a billionaire means you are not just producing billions of profit for yourself, but billions of value for others. That every deal, both sides are better off. This is what we aspire to, the whole ideal towards voluntary trade and capitalism as a method a tide that rises almost all boats and at the very least doesn't involve sinking another boat lower.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.” — Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
Mostly true, compared to other billionaires he's a much better flavor and a stronger record of appearing human but still, agree. I'd recommend reading
The Snowball for a more complete understanding of him.
You ever see Good Will Hunting? The scene where he talks about where he can “just play” and then describes the most talented people in history at what they do. That’s Buffett in his chosen life’s work.
Buffett didn’t get, for example, a small loan of a million dollars to start. He’s been working at this longer than probably anyone what will ever read this comment has been alive.
He doesn’t care about the money in the sense I feel you’re implying.
Nobody is perfect, and holding anyone to that standard sets an impossible threshold.
I don’t know how familiar you are with Warren Buffett, but I would encourage you to dig into his Wikipedia page at least, however accurate we think that is these days.
Jobs is probably a good example here, and obviously there aren't many Jobses in the world. As far as I know, he started with nothing really.
Bill Gates however was born rich and had powerful, well-connected parents and grandparents.
Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money? He wouldn't have gone to a prestigious school with nice computers (or any computers), or have been able to fail at traf-o-data and keep going, for example.
His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.
The older I get, the more I believe that "you can start with nothing and make it" is essentially a lie told to the working class to keep them from cannibalizing the rich (via taxation).
> Obviously Bill did better with those tools than most people would, but would it have been possible if he started as an average kid with an average amount of money?
Yes. Remember Woz had no money and no computer and still wrote Apple Basic. He wrote it in a notebook and hand-assembled it. An 8 bit Basic can be written in about 2K bytes.
I designed and built a 6800 computer in 1978, and wrote the software for it all in asm (the result was a VT-100 terminal workalike). I did have an assembler available which certainly made me more productive, but it was still small enough to do by hand. There were only 40 instructions or so in the 6800, and after a while one inadvertently had them memorized. You could hand assemble them as fast as you could write. In those days I wrote code asm in pencil in a spiral notebook.
What made Gates & Allen special was not their families, but their ability to see the opportunity that everyone else missed. When the MITS computer was the front page on Popular Science magazine, Allen saw it and ran to Gates exclaiming that this was the opportunity they were looking for, and they needed to get to work on it immediately.
> His mom was on the board of a charity which included the CEO of IBM, which is how IBM got involved with Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft without that deal, or without Mary Gates, or the money that facilitates all these kinds of things.
IBM gave Gary Kildall the opportunity first. Gary whiffed the deal, and then IBM went to Gates. Gary Kildall did not have a wealthy background, and he became quite wealthy off of CP/M.
I agree and would also like to read it, but I understand his family's decision. I'd probably do the same.
In retrospect, I wish I had pressed my dad to write an account of his wartime experiences. Fortunately, his letters were saved, but unfortunately, the letters were censored and so were kinda cardboard.
Better late than never, I don’t know if you’ll see this. He started investing well before people started giving him money. Like, decades.
Wikipedia page on Buffett:
At 11, he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred for himself, and three for his sister Doris Buffett (who also became a philanthropist).[20][21][22] At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly (equivalent to $3,057 in 2024) delivering Washington Post newspapers. In high school, he invested in a business owned by his father and bought a 40-acre farm worked by a tenant farmer.[23] He bought the land when he was 14 years old with $1,200 (equivalent to $21,434 in 2024) of his savings.[23] By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had amassed $9,800 in savings (equivalent to $129,511 in 2024).[18]
Have you ever read Elon's wiki? Or any other individual rich enough to curate whatever views they choose?
Warren buffet did good and he came up with a winning strategy. Momentum was ultimately his friend and what drove his success. When ETFs are great today and their popularity largely because of Warren, I think a lot of what's increasingly becoming obviously wrong with the markets ties back to the original strategy behind ETFs.
There's no more self selection or focus on fundamentals. All pensions are now exposed and regular contributors to the markets, so winner and losing picking doesn't really exist in the same way and performance is no longer tied to reality. I dread what that means as populations stagnant since it puts some risk on future pensions and their somewhat ponzi-esque structure.
All the pessimistic rants aside - it's insane to refer me to a billionaire's wiki as an attempt to get to know them. I largely look at people based on how they might treat family, friends, strangers, etc. In that regard, I'm mixed.
Risk tolerance is a component of character. Musk has put his entire fortune on the line more than once, and more than once was a whisker from bankruptcy.
I'm far less of a risk taker than he is, and have consequently not made big scores like Musk.
I'm going to reserve judgement on that because the media lens is pretty distorting. He's not afraid to stand up to bullies, and I've seen that interpreted as assholishness.
Steve Jobs also had a reputation as an asshole. A couple of my friends had encounters with him, and I asked is he really an asshole? Both confidently said yes. !!
It's fascinating how even smart people like you become so utterly naive when it comes to politics. This guy partly owns some of the most evil companies humanity has ever created ffs. Zero ethics, 100% capitalist greed.
He made his billions by figuring out who were worthy people to give money to.
He's not exactly curing cancer but i could think of a lot more underhanded ways to make billions. I think he is above average ethically relative to his billionaire peers.
He owns a lot of companies and keeps his distance from their reputations. Companies make money and stay on top by doing awful things. Think about coca cola and plastic pollution. Buffett has to own that when he has a controlling stake.
What’s the counter-factual here? Coca Cola not allowed to exist? Plastic not a permissible material for soft drink bottles? Nobody allowed to drink soft drink? Companies forced to clean the streets?
I dislike plastic pollution as much as you do, but your elected representatives have more responsibility here than Buffett.
Imagine what a world we would live in if people held themselves to the same standard they hold billionaires to. After all, coca-cola would change their ways pretty quickly if people stopped buying things over the issue.
Berkshire owns less than 10% of Coke. That’s means Berkshire’s voice is represented in the boardroom, but is more than a factor of five from the common definition of “controlling stake”.
