Warren E. Buffett

Age: 76

Board Afflilations: The Washington Post Company (WPO)

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Warren Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha,” is the C.E.O. and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, a holding company that has invested in everything from underwear to ice cream. Buffett is the second-richest person in the world, with a fortune estimated at $42 billion. He plans to give most of it away.

WHERE HE CAME FROM
Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett has remained true to his Midwestern roots—he still lives there, in a home he purchased for $31,500 in 1958.

Buffett’s father, a stockbroker and congressman, taught his son about investing early on. At 11, while working at his father’s brokerage firm, Buffett purchased his first stock—three shares of Cities Services at $38 each. Buffett sold when the price reached $40 and then watched as it rose to $200 over the next few years. This lesson about long-term investing stayed with him.

Buffett began his college studies at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, but completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Nebraska. At Columbia University, while earning a master’s in economics, he studied under investor Benjamin Graham. A few years after graduation, Buffett landed a job at Graham’s firm, where he learned the importance of analyzing balance sheets and searching out undervalued companies—which later became cornerstones of his investing strategy.

In 1956, Buffett returned to Omaha and formed his own business, with friends and family making up the first seven partners. The Buffett Partnership purchased Berkshire Hathaway, a small New England textile company, in 1965. Four years later, saying that he could find “no current bargains in the market,” Buffett liquidated the partnership and distributed the earnings. The only stock he kept was Berkshire. It was in 1970, one year later, that Buffett, began to turn Berkshire from textile manufacturer into the diversified holding company it is today.

WHERE HE IS NOW
The rest is the stuff of business legend. Buffett has largely avoided getting swept up in investing fads and simply stuck to his patient and calculated way of doing business. Berkshire Hathaway has a market capitalization of around $170 billion and owns companies as diverse as Geico, NetJets, and Fruit of the Loom. All are run in a hands-off manner: Buffett looks for companies with strong management in place and usually makes no changes.

Although he’s a billionaire many times over, Buffett is famously thrifty, with no appetite for flashy cars or yachts. He has vehemently opposed runaway executive compensation and takes home an annual salary of just $100,000.

He also supports the inheritance tax. Buffett has three children by his first wife, Susan Thompson (they separated in 1977 but remained married until her death in 2004), and has often said that he wants to leave his children enough money so they can do something, but not enough so they won’t have to do anything.

In keeping with those values, in 2006 he pledged 85 percent of his Berkshire Hathaway stock to charity, the bulk of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The donation, then valued at $37 billion, was the largest gift to charity in history.

WHAT’S NEXT
Buffett has decided on a successor at Berkshire Hathaway, but he’s keeping that name to himself, showing that he clearly isn’t ready to give up the game. He has joined the Gateses on the board of their foundation and is expected to play a large role. And he has a new marriage to tend to—Buffett wed his longtime partner, Astrid Menks, in 2006. —Jennifer Close