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Warren Buffett Biography: From Omaha to Berkshire Hathaway

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Warren Buffett’s relationship with Berkshire Hathaway began with an investment he later called a mistake. His partnership started buying shares in the struggling textile company in 1962 and gained control in 1965. Berkshire closed its textile operations in 1985, but by then the corporation was developing in a different direction.

Insurance, other operating businesses, and long-term stock investments became Berkshire’s focus. Buffett’s role grew beyond choosing undervalued securities to overseeing the allocation of capital among businesses, investments, and managers. The judgment required was no longer just what a share was worth, but what Berkshire should own.

Buffett’s tenure as CEO ended with 2025. In September 2026, he also became chairman emeritus while remaining on Berkshire’s board. Those two steps closed his decades in the company’s top leadership offices.

A Quick Look at the Life of Warren Buffett

Biography Summary

Warren Edward Buffett is an American investor, business executive, and philanthropist. Educated in Benjamin Graham’s value-investing tradition, he went on to lead Berkshire Hathaway’s expansion into insurance, operating businesses, and corporate investments. His career also reflects Charlie Munger’s influence, publicly acknowledged investment mistakes, and a commitment to donating more than 99% of his wealth.

Profile

Full Name: Warren Edward Buffett

Born: August 30, 1930

Birthplace: Omaha, Nebraska, United States

Nationality: American

Education: Attended the Wharton School and the University of Nebraska; earned a graduate economics degree from Columbia University in 1951

Best Known For: Leading Berkshire Hathaway and developing its investment and business-ownership model

Berkshire Hathaway Roles: Chief executive officer, 1970–2025; board chairman, 1970–September 18, 2026; chairman emeritus and director as of October 15, 2026

Key Collaborator: Charlie Munger, longtime Berkshire vice chairman

Philanthropy: Publicly committed to giving more than 99% of his wealth to charitable purposes

Omaha, Washington, and an Early Interest in Business

Buffett was born in Omaha on August 30, 1930, to Howard and Leila Buffett. His father worked as a stockbroker and later served in the U.S. Congress. The family spent part of Warren’s school years in Washington, D.C., during Howard Buffett’s congressional service.

Buffett delivered newspapers and pursued small businesses in his youth, including selling goods and operating pinball machines. He later recalled buying his first stock in 1942. Selling, trading, and purchasing shares were already part of his experience before he began investing professionally.

Buffett began attending the Wharton School in 1947 and later transferred to the University of Nebraska. He then studied economics at Columbia University, earning a graduate degree in 1951. There, the ideas of Benjamin Graham offered a framework for judging securities by the relationship between market prices and underlying business value. Graham and David Dodd were leading figures in Columbia’s value-investing tradition; Buffett did not originate that tradition.

Benjamin Graham, GEICO, and the First Omaha Partnership

Buffett’s exposure to Graham reached beyond the classroom. In a 2017 Columbia conversation, he described discovering Graham’s writing as a turning point in his education. Referring to that discovery, Buffett said, “That changed my whole life.”

In 1951, Buffett investigated the auto insurer GEICO, spoke with executive Lorimer Davidson, and bought shares. Its lower-cost direct-sales model caught his attention. He later recalled investing about 65% of his then $9,800 net worth in GEICO. The figure comes from his own account.

Graham did not initially hire Buffett after his Columbia studies. Buffett returned to Omaha and worked at his father’s brokerage, then joined Graham-Newman in New York in 1954. When the firm closed in 1956, Buffett went back to Omaha to manage money independently.

His new partnership began with approximately $105,000 from seven partners and $100 of Buffett’s own money. It gave him an independent way to put his investment approach to work on behalf of others. One of the stocks that would come to dominate its holdings was Berkshire Hathaway.

How a Textile Bargain Became Berkshire Hathaway

Buffett did not create Berkshire Hathaway. The company had emerged from the 1955 merger of two New England textile businesses, and its manufacturing operations were under pressure when his partnership began buying its shares in December 1962.

At first, Berkshire appealed as a stock selling at a discount to its working capital. In a later account, Buffett described a 1964 disagreement with company executive Seabury Stanton over a proposed share repurchase. Buffett said the lower-than-expected offer irritated him enough to buy more shares instead of selling. His partnership took control of Berkshire at a May 1965 board meeting.

Control did not solve Berkshire’s manufacturing problems. Despite efforts to improve operations, textiles remained an underperforming business, and Berkshire shut the division in 1985. Buffett later described his original investment as a fundamental mistake.

The textile operation was only one part of the company’s future. Berkshire became a vehicle for acquiring and holding other businesses and investments. Buffett closed his investment partnerships in 1969, offering investors choices that included Berkshire shares. His formal Berkshire CEO and chairman tenure began in 1970, five years after the partnership had gained control.

Insurance Changes the Direction of Berkshire

Berkshire’s purchase of National Indemnity for $8.6 million in 1967 marked a major shift away from reliance on textiles. Insurance brought a different operating model: premiums could be collected before claims were paid, creating funds—often called insurance float—that could be invested while the insurer remained responsible for future claims.

Float came with underwriting obligations and claims risk, rather than guaranteed investment gains. Even so, insurance became a central Berkshire business. Buffett later argued that acquiring National Indemnity through Berkshire, rather than directly through his investment partnership, had been a mistake because of how the resulting gains were divided between investor groups.

The GEICO interest Buffett had first developed in 1951 became part of this longer insurance story. Berkshire built a substantial ownership position and, on January 2, 1996, completed the purchase of GEICO shares it did not already own. A student investor’s early interest had become part of a much larger insurance enterprise.

Charlie Munger, See’s Candies, and a Different Kind of Value

Buffett met Charlie Munger in 1959. Their long association became one of the defining relationships in Berkshire’s history, with Munger later serving as vice chairman and challenging aspects of Buffett’s earlier investing approach.

Buffett’s early approach often focused on deeply discounted, sometimes mediocre businesses—the kind he later called cigar-butt investments. He credited Munger with directing his attention toward companies worth owning for their underlying quality, even when they were not available at extreme discounts. That change was gradual rather than a single dated conversion.

The 1972 purchase of See’s Candies became an important example. The buyer was Blue Chip Stamps, in which Buffett, Munger, and Berkshire had significant interests, and which later merged into Berkshire. See’s possessed customer loyalty and pricing power without requiring the same continuing capital demands as a struggling industrial operation. Buffett later explained that he had initially resisted paying the price See’s owners sought—another judgment he came to reconsider.

Reflecting on such lessons in his 1989 shareholder letter, Buffett wrote: “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.” Berkshire’s significant Coca-Cola investment beginning in 1988 also belonged to this phase of attention to durable consumer businesses.

Berkshire’s early textile investment had been attractive largely because of its low share price. See’s suggested a different question: whether a business’s customers, pricing power, and limited capital needs could make it worth owning for years. Buffett credited Munger with helping him give those qualities greater weight.

The Salomon Brothers Crisis Tests Buffett’s Responsibilities

Berkshire’s investment in Salomon Brothers brought Buffett into a different kind of challenge in 1991. Misconduct involving Treasury-securities auctions created regulatory and reputational danger at the securities firm. Senior leaders departed, and Buffett temporarily became Salomon’s chairman.

The response required more than an investment decision. Buffett addressed employees, called for tighter safeguards, and testified before Congress about the need for compliance. The trading violations were Salomon’s; they were not established as misconduct by Buffett personally.

The crisis put Buffett in a temporary corporate leadership role, responding publicly to serious problems inside a company in which Berkshire held an investment.

From Major Investments to an Operating-Business Group

During Buffett’s leadership, Berkshire expanded through a combination of businesses it controlled and stock-market stakes in companies it did not control. Insurance and reinsurance were joined by manufacturing, services, retail, rail transportation, and energy operations. Berkshire was neither simply a portfolio of listed shares nor a collection of wholly owned companies: it operated as both.

GEICO became wholly owned in 1996, and Berkshire acquired General Re in 1998. During the 2008 financial crisis, Berkshire agreed to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs preferred stock, with a 10% preferred dividend and warrants. That was a transaction undertaken by Berkshire, not a personal rescue financed by Buffett.

Berkshire announced an agreement to acquire the remaining BNSF shares in November 2009 and completed the purchase in February 2010. The railroad joined an expanding collection of businesses, giving Berkshire another large operating company alongside its insurance operations and investment holdings.

Results over decades made Berkshire closely associated with Buffett’s name. In its published comparison for 1965 through 2024, Berkshire reported a 19.9% compounded annual growth rate in the market value of its shares, versus 10.4% for the S&P 500 including dividends. These are historical corporate-share returns for a specified period, not Buffett’s personal annual wealth growth or a promise of future performance.

In his shareholder letters, Buffett explained Berkshire’s combination of operating businesses, minority investments, and reinvestment. He also examined errors, making mistakes part of the record he presented to shareholders rather than leaving them outside the account.

Investment Reversals and Risks Beyond the Portfolio

One prominent example was Kraft Heinz. Berkshire had participated in the 2015 combination, and in 2019 Buffett publicly acknowledged that Berkshire had overpaid for Kraft.

The 2020 pandemic brought another reversal. Berkshire sold its stakes in American, Delta, Southwest, and United airlines, and Buffett explained that his expectations for the industry had changed. The sales reversed earlier investments rather than reflecting a long-standing refusal to own airline stocks.

Ownership of major operating companies also carried risks beyond stock selection. Berkshire-owned PacifiCorp faced litigation arising from western U.S. wildfires in 2020. An Oregon jury issued a verdict against the utility in 2023, but the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed that verdict and remanded the case on April 8, 2026, because of a prejudicial jury instruction. PacifiCorp also announced settlements with groups of claimants. The litigation concerned the utility’s conduct; it did not establish Buffett’s personal liability, and the appellate ruling did not settle every disputed issue.

In shareholder communications, Buffett also acknowledged mistakes in acquisition decisions and hiring. His account of Berkshire’s performance left room for decisions he would later judge differently.

Family, Philanthropy, and Who Would Distribute the Wealth

Buffett married Susan Thompson in 1952. Their children are Susan, known as Susie, Howard, and Peter. Susan moved to San Francisco in 1977, but the couple remained married until her death in July 2004. Buffett married Astrid Menks on August 30, 2006, his 76th birthday.

That same year Buffett publicly committed to donating Berkshire shares over time. In 2010, as a founding organizer of the Giving Pledge alongside Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, he stated his intention to devote more than 99% of his wealth to philanthropy. It was a pledge about the ultimate use of his fortune, not an assertion that all those gifts had already been completed.

The Gates Foundation was a major recipient. Buffett served as one of its trustees from 2006 to 2021 and was subsequently identified as emeritus. The foundation valued its cumulative gifts from Buffett through 2022 at $36 billion on receipt, and said in July 2026 that the cumulative total had surpassed $47 billion. These figures refer to different reporting dates.

His family foundations became increasingly central to later plans. In November 2025 he donated 2.7 million Berkshire Class B shares across four family foundations: the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation. His accompanying message also looked back on Omaha and explained changes in how he would communicate with shareholders.

In July 2026, Buffett announced another gift of 12 million Class B shares, then valued at nearly $6 billion, to those four foundations. The Gates Foundation was not included in that distribution. In an interview that July, Buffett said he had stopped donations to the Gates Foundation because his children were now older and prepared to distribute his fortune. He also stated a goal of completing transfers of his remaining shares to the family foundations by December 31, 2034. That date was a plan for future giving, not a completed transfer.

From CEO to Chairman Emeritus: The 2025–2026 Transition

The later years of Buffett’s leadership brought the end of two long associations: his work with Charlie Munger, who died on November 28, 2023, and his own decades as Berkshire Hathaway’s chief executive and chairman. Those responsibilities passed to successors in two separate steps.

At Berkshire’s May 3, 2025 shareholder meeting, Buffett announced that he planned to leave the CEO post at the end of the year. The board approved Greg Abel as president and chief executive effective January 1, 2026. Buffett also said in a November 2025 message that Abel would take over the company’s annual shareholder-report communications, while Buffett expected to continue occasional Thanksgiving letters.

Buffett initially remained board chairman after Abel became CEO. On September 18, 2026, Berkshire announced a further division of responsibilities: Buffett became chairman emeritus and remained a director, his son Howard G. Buffett became nonexecutive chairman, and Abel continued as chief executive.

In his September 2026 message, Buffett summarized the division of responsibilities: “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values”. It expressed his confidence in the arrangement rather than a prediction of Berkshire’s future results.

A Berkshire Hathaway Beyond Buffett’s Executive Tenure

Buffett’s career connected Graham’s lessons about price and value with Munger’s emphasis on stronger businesses, insurance, and the ownership of operating companies. His acknowledged mistakes and philanthropic commitments were also part of that record. By October 2026, Berkshire’s next leadership chapter had begun without ending Buffett’s association with the company.

Timeline

These milestones trace Buffett’s education, investment partnerships, Berkshire Hathaway decisions, major setbacks, philanthropy, and leadership transition.

Timeline.

1930

Warren Edward Buffett is born in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 30.

1942

His father wins election to Congress. Buffett later recalls buying his first stock that year.

1947–1951

Buffett attends Wharton, transfers to the University of Nebraska, and completes a graduate economics degree at Columbia in 1951. He also investigates GEICO and buys its shares.

1952

Buffett marries Susan Thompson.

1954–1956

He joins Graham-Newman in New York in 1954, then returns to Omaha to establish an independent investment partnership in 1956.

1959

Buffett meets Charlie Munger, his future longtime Berkshire collaborator.

1962–1965

Buffett’s partnership begins purchasing Berkshire Hathaway shares in December 1962 and obtains control in May 1965.

1967

Berkshire acquires National Indemnity, establishing an important insurance business.

1969–1970

Buffett winds down his investment partnerships in 1969. His Berkshire CEO and chairman tenure begins in 1970.

1972

Blue Chip Stamps purchases See’s Candies, later an influential example in Buffett’s approach to business quality.

1985–1988

Berkshire closes its textile operations in 1985. It begins making major Coca-Cola stock purchases in 1988.

1991

Buffett temporarily takes the chairmanship of Salomon Brothers during the firm’s Treasury-securities bidding scandal.

1996–1998

GEICO becomes wholly owned by Berkshire in 1996, followed by the acquisition of General Re in 1998.

2004–2006

Susan Thompson Buffett dies in July 2004. Buffett marries Astrid Menks in August 2006 and announces a major charitable-giving commitment that year.

2008–2010

Berkshire makes a $5 billion Goldman Sachs investment in 2008 and completes its acquisition of BNSF in 2010. Buffett helps launch the Giving Pledge in 2010.

2015–2020

Berkshire participates in the 2015 Kraft Heinz transaction; Buffett later says it overpaid for Kraft. In 2020 Berkshire sells its positions in four major U.S. airlines.

2023

Charlie Munger dies on November 28.

2025

Buffett announces his intention to retire as Berkshire CEO at year-end. In November he makes additional gifts to four family foundations.

January 2026

Greg Abel becomes Berkshire Hathaway’s president and CEO on January 1.

July 2026

Buffett announces another substantial distribution to four family foundations and sets a goal of completing transfers of his remaining shares by the end of 2034.

September 2026

Buffett becomes chairman emeritus and remains a director on September 18. Howard G. Buffett becomes nonexecutive chairman; Greg Abel remains CEO.

FAQs

Did Warren Buffett found Berkshire Hathaway?

No. Berkshire Hathaway was a textile company formed before Buffett’s involvement. His investment partnership began buying shares in December 1962 and gained control in May 1965. Berkshire’s later development under his leadership should not be confused with founding the original company.

When did Warren Buffett become Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO?

Buffett’s tenure as Berkshire Hathaway’s CEO began in 1970, five years after his partnership obtained control of the textile company. He remained CEO through the end of 2025, and Greg Abel succeeded him on January 1, 2026.

How did insurance help Berkshire Hathaway grow?

Berkshire entered insurance with its 1967 purchase of National Indemnity. Insurers may invest premium funds before claims are paid; those funds are known as float. The potential to invest float contributed to Berkshire’s capital-allocation model, while underwriting obligations and claims risk remained important.

What did Charlie Munger change about Buffett’s investing approach?

Buffett credited Munger with encouraging him to look beyond extremely cheap but mediocre businesses and focus more on strong companies purchased at reasonable prices. He often used the 1972 See’s Candies acquisition as an example of the economics that made the shift attractive.

Who leads Berkshire Hathaway after Buffett’s 2026 transition?

As of October 15, 2026, Greg Abel is Berkshire Hathaway’s president and CEO, while Howard G. Buffett is nonexecutive board chairman. Warren Buffett remains chairman emeritus and a director, but no longer holds either of the company’s two top leadership offices.

Why was the Gates Foundation not included in Buffett’s July 2026 gifts?

Buffett’s July 2026 share distribution went to four family foundations rather than the Gates Foundation. In a contemporaneously reported interview, he explained that his children were older and prepared to direct the distribution of his fortune. That was his stated reason for the changed giving structure.

Interviews

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Speak with Columbia Students (2017)

This conversation returns Buffett to the university where he studied under Benjamin Graham. Buffett discusses the importance of Graham’s writing and his early investigation of GEICO, providing a firsthand account of ideas that shaped his investment career. The discussion also places those memories alongside reflections on education and philanthropy.

View the Columbia conversation

Further Reading

Sources