On May 3rd, the shocking, yet expected, announcement finally came. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, will step down at the end of 2025. The 94 year old is finally passing the reins of the vaunted insurance-plus conglomerate to his successors, Greg Abel and Ajit Jain, and putting an end to the storied career of one of America’s most prolific, legendary investors.

I thought now is as good a time as ever to take stock of his life and career, because it carries many lessons that young investors like myself carry with us. Warren Buffett isn’t just a legendary investor, he is also a Good investor, one of the few who are left, and I think it’s important to highlight why that’s so important.

Warren Buffett’s net worth currently stands at about $160 billion, easily placing him in the top ten richest people in the world. Yet unlike most of his peers, he made his money from investment, not entrepreneurship, and unlike most of his investing peers, he stuck with a relatively conservative methodology, didn’t overstep his role, offered advice when he could, and didn’t allow his lifestyle to adjust to his money. In a dark shadowy world of scummy money folks, Buffett is the bright lighthouse shining a better way.

From Humble Beginnings

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1930. An early investing talent, he studied at Penn’s Wharton School and took an interest in the kind of investing practiced by Benjamin Graham, a professor at Columbia at the time. Graham practiced Value Investing, an investing style where the investor looks for existing value that the market is overlooking, as opposed to Growth Investing, where the investor looks forward for future growth in more popular stocks. Graham, the “Father of Value Investing”, wrote the book The Intelligent Investor that lays out the principles of his style, the revised edition of which is still sold today (and is how I got my start in the markets). Graham emphasized the importance of separating emotion from financial analysis, and of separating a company’s fundamental business from its stock price. That way, the intelligent investor could identify areas that the market is not valuing properly, and can profit as the market grows and that value is identified and accreted.

Warren took this investing approach and ran with it. As a small time investor, he was constantly on the hunt for small, struggling companies that were undervalued, arguing that if he could make a small profit in each instance, the totality would result in great investment performance. This is often nicknamed Cigar Butt Investing because of the desire to, metaphorically, find the cigar butts on the ground that the market has discarded too soon, getting those last few puffs out of them, and profiting that small difference.

But as Buffett’s portfolio grew, his investment philosophy grew as well. Where he once saw small but consistent value in buying the cigar butts, he now saw greater value in taking a more active stake in growing companies. An excerpt from his 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter reads:

“One advantage of our […] business is that – episodically – it becomes easy to buy pieces of wonderful businesses at wonderful prices. It’s crucial to understand that stocks often trade at truly foolish prices, both high and low.”

In 1956, Buffett bought the textile company Berkshire Hathaway, turning it into a diversified holding company for his public investments, leveraging Berkshire’s cash flows with his personal contributions. His investing style grew from Graham’s Value Investing, but did not materially deviate from its core concept. Buffett sought to acquire companies, or parts of companies, where he saw value that the market did not see, and where he could take a somewhat active stake in helping those companies realize that value.

Several investments that Berkshire has made embody this philosophy. Buffett’s acquisition of GEICO Insurance in 1996, Dairy Queen in 1997, BNSF Railway Company in 2010, and Pilot Flying J Gas Stations in 2024, are each examples of Berkshire taking a large stake in existing, growing companies, and then leveraging both Berkshire’s existing capital and know-how to make those businesses better. A full list of investments Berkshire owns can be found here.

Buffett has written extensively on how he likes to fund his business and his investments. After buying Berkshire, he focused on acquiring property-casualty insurance businesses, such as GEICO, Wesco, and Faraday. These businesses, when run well, operate on a “float” of insurance revenue greater than claimant payouts, allowing that money to be plowed into other areas. However Berkshire may focus on property-casualty insurance, it is a truly diversified company, with stakes in companies across all sectors of the economy, including Occidental Petroleum, Apple, Coca-Cola, BNSF, See’s Candies, Precision Castparts, AltaLink, American Express, Charter Comunications, and much more. Today, Berkshire is just about as good an approximation of the health of the whole US economy as the S&P 500.

Lessons To Learn

The story of Berkshire Hathaway is the story of financial success. But what separates Warren Buffett’s financial success from his peers?

I posit that Warren Buffett doesn’t just embody the role and the profession of the investor, he embodies the spirit of what an investor should be, too. Every February, he writes the annual Berkshire shareholder letter, and every May, he holds the shareholder convention in Omaha, Nebraska, where he still lives to this day. The event is free for shareholders, and the letters are free to read here. Read a couple of them, and you’ll begin to see what I mean. Warren Buffett, doesn’t just take advantage of the opportunities America has given him to find personal success, he loves America for giving him those opportunities, and gives back to his country when he can.

In his 2008 shareholder letter, Buffett writes about the financial collapse and recession gripping the country. But he is quick to add perspective, writing:

“Amid this bad news, however, never forget that our country has faced far worse travails in the past. In
the 20th Century alone, we dealt with two great wars (one of which we initially appeared to be losing); a dozen or
so panics and recessions; virulent inflation that led to a 211⁄2% prime rate in 1980; and the Great Depression of
the 1930s, when unemployment ranged between 15% and 25% for many years. America has had no shortage of
challenges.

“Without fail, however, we’ve overcome them. In the face of those obstacles – and many others – the
real standard of living for Americans improved nearly seven-fold during the 1900s, while the Dow Jones
Industrials rose from 66 to 11,497. Compare the record of this period with the dozens of centuries during which
humans secured only tiny gains, if any, in how they lived. Though the path has not been smooth, our economic
system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”

His letters are the spirit of investor optimism, a reassurance that the gears of growth-oriented capitalism keep ever turning, that America is still the best place for your money, and to be optimistic about what lies ahead. In that 2008 letter, he puts it short and sweet: “Buy American. I will.”

Buffett’s investing career also shows the importance of having friends and partners, and being able to bounce ideas off them to make them better. Buffett may have gotten his start into value investing from Benjamin Graham, but he didn’t reorient that style without help from his trusted business partner, Charlie Munger. Charlie was a bit older and a bit wiser than Warren, and was the curt check on his long-winded investment pitches. What started as two investors butting heads quickly turned into a lifelong partnership, as both men learned from each other and became their best investing selves. Warren learned to value Charlie’s quick, wry way of separating deep value from investor babble, and in 1978, Charlie became vice chairman of Berkshire, Warren’s right-hand man until his death in 2023.

Warren Buffett also gave back to his government when called upon. Watch the 2011 movie Too Big To Fail and you’ll get a sense of just how much then- Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson called upon the Oracle of Omaha for guidance during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2002, his involvement in AIG led them to offer reinsurance on top of other products. In 2008, he acquired 10% of Goldman Sachs’s preferred stock, a lifeline at a time when capital for bank-holding-companies was drying up. And in 2011, he acquired $5 billion of preferred stock and warrants of Bank of America, buying at rock-bottom prices while simultaneously providing a similar lifeline and capital infusion to Goldman. Years later, in 2017 and 2018, he exercised those warrants, cashing them in for common stock, at significant capital gains due to the bank recovering so much after the financial crisis. He used the tools he was capable of using to add value to both his company and his country, giving us the clearest example against the zero-sum mentality today.

Buffett was also a major voice in the uneven recovery that followed 2008. In 2011, president Barack Obama included the “Buffett Rule” in his budget proposal, based on the principle that billionaires should pay the same tax rates as middle-class families pay. Buffett gave a few speeches saying “I shouldn’t be paying a lower income tax rate than my secretary or housekeeper.” The rule wasn’t formally adopted into policy, but it remains a popular rallying cry for tax fairness, especially as the number of billionaires has increased.

Overall, Warren Buffett is the embodiment of living a slower, more intentional investing life. He still lives in the same $31,500 house in Omaha he bought in 1958, he has the same morning routine every single day, he likes some simple things, and he has pledged to give away most of his personal wealth. His investing is almost all done through Berkshire, and he only receives a $100,000 salary, a figure unchanged for over 40 years. Compare that to most Fortune 500 CEOs today with their many-millions annual payouts. There is a certain amount of asceticism in his relatively modest lifestyle, a man rich enough to have it all, choosing to have only what makes him happy.

I think this is what a lot of the younger generation lacks today, and it is absolutely a factor in the comparably lightning-quick, incidental investing environment of today. Back in Buffett’s early years, investing was a gamble, stock prices weren’t as transparent, and there weren’t things like index funds to capture market-wide performance. In his lifetime, those kinds of innovations made the investing world more simple, and easier to understand. He helped popularize it, to bring it to more people, and was in that regard a positive force for the world. But compare that to today, where everywhere you look, you’ll find a new, exotic, opaque investment opportunity waiting to separate you from your money. Whether that’s cryptocurrency, equity derivatives, NFTs, currency swaps, or whatever comes next, the investing world has gotten much more complex to analyze.

Investing legends like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch got to be legends not just because they were the best at their craft. They got to be legendary investors because they were also Good Investors, willing to dumb things down for the masses, and popularize enduring concepts for those masses. They are inspiration that you can be a good investor and also a good person. And there’s less and less of that today. The older, wiser generation of investing giants is fading from our view, and what comes next might not be so universal in their views.

To Close

In the business of investing and markets, no one goes it alone. The market is made up of all of us, and it’s important to learn what the best in the biz are doing, and doing well. Warren Buffett has been at the top of this business for as long as I can remember, and he got there by both being a successful investor, but also by being a good human being. It’s easy to become greedy and narrow-eyed with your money and making more, but it’s both harder and more important to know when to stop and take stock of the success you’ve had, and to give back. Warren Buffett embodies that quaint, indominable spirit, and not many other top investors can carry that persona. I worry that as Buffett retires, the next generation of investors won’t get that message. The explosion of risky, unregulated investment opportunities is already bearing this out, but we’re just getting started.

So go back and read those shareholder letters, watch the next meeting in Omaha when Greg Abel takes the Berkshire reins, and let’s appreciate what Warren Buffett offers to America; a man who can have it all, but who knows when to stop and be happy.

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