Warren Buffett turns 96: How he built $1tn Berkshire empire

Warren Buffett turns 96 today, his first birthday since stepping away from the job he held for 55 years. He remains Berkshire Hathaway's chairman, still walking into the office five days a week.

Born in Omaha on August 30, 1930, during the height of the Great Depression era, he is the son of a stockbroker who became a congressman.

He started his own entrepreneurial activities at the age of six, selling candy from door to door, purchasing his first stock at 11, filing his first tax return at 13 and saving a whopping $85,000 when he was 16.

Having graduated from Wharton and Columbia universities, where he studied the value investment approach under the guidance of Benjamin Graham, he started Buffett Partnership back in Omaha in 1956.

Initially, Buffett searched for underpriced “cigar butt” stocks that were about to expire. However, this strategy changed after his meeting with Charlie Munger in 1959 when Munger convinced Buffett to purchase “wonderful companies at fair prices".

Early in his career, Buffett focused on finding cheap, undervalued companies, a strategy he famously compared to buying “cigar butts” with one last puff of value left in them. That approach began to change after he met Charlie Munger in 1959, who encouraged him to look beyond bargain prices and instead buy “wonderful companies at fair prices”.

Buffett put that philosophy into practice in 1965, when he took control of Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling textile company. What began as a dispute with the company’s management over a failed deal would eventually become the defining investment of Buffett’s career.

Over the following decades, Buffett transformed Berkshire from a struggling textile business into an insurance and investment empire. The company acquired businesses including See’s Candies, Geico and BNSF Railway, while its insurance operations provided Buffett with a steady pool of low-cost capital known as “float” that could be invested elsewhere.

The stocks of Berkshire increased by approximately 6,100,000% between 1964 and 2025 as compared to only 46,000% in the case of the S&P 500 index during the same time frame. The value of Berkshire increased above the trillion-dollar mark in late 2024.

On January 1, 2026, Greg Abel became the CEO of Berkshire, which put an end to Buffett’s reign as CEO that had spanned 55 years. Buffett still remains the chairman of Berkshire.

One of his latest investment picks was Alphabet. Warren Buffett personally made Berkshire's initial $38 billion investment in Google's parent company, which has now become the company's third largest investment after Apple and American Express.