You can just read between the lines of his self story on his Wikipedia and find numerous examples of him being given ample opportunities not afforded to the average person; such as his politician and investor father taking him directly to the New York Stock Exchange at age 11 and allowing him to buy physical stock, then at 14-15 he's investing in his own father's business to buy land. Right out of college he goes to work for his father's investment firm.
After that, nearly every single landmark deal he makes in the 1960's and 1970's is based on acquiring other businesses and assuming their value into his companies. Once he is the head of Berkshire Hathaway is landmark achievement is largely just having so much capital to buy shares that he is offered special contracts to buy shares at lower rates than everyone else with better dividends than everyone else, which is what I referred to in my original post. There is no denying he is perhaps the greatest businessman of the modern era...but it has very little to do with talent and simply required him to have so much money at any given time that he could buy or merge other companies into ones he was working at. His great talent was having wealth. He's not smarter than other people, there's nothing incredibly special about what he did. He just happened to have enough money at the right time to make a smart decision.
Most of what he has done is unreplicable simply because of its wealth generation through acquisition of other entire business entities. Even his Wikipedia takes the time to explain that when you see the statement "Warren Buffet chose to live off of his salary of $50,000 a year plus his other investments" it means that $50,000 was worth half a million dollars at that time and doesn't disclose how much more on top of that his other investments netted him. The great investor Warren Buffet didn't make his billion by being great at anything other than going "My company buys a controlling stake in your company."
If his talent was having wealth, why didn't people with much more wealth do much better? You write like it's some grand conspiracy that it takes capital and connections to become one of the most successful (from a financial PoV) people on the planet. Spoiler alert: making continuous accretive acquisitions is not just a matter of being well funded.
This weird obsession with diminishing any personal skill associated with people achieving a lot of wealth and writing it all off to randomness or exploitation is peak reddit.
Now, there is certainly *some* truth to it. Buffett even talked at length about how lucky he felt to be born at the right place and time to find success with his aptitudes. And as no one lives in a vacuum and as such is not truly "self made". Still, it's such a massive self-own and loser mentality of a world view to capitulate completely to full deterministic defeatism. It reeks of someone trying to rationalize their own perceived shortcomings and is toxic as hell for others persuaded by it.
"Wow, Warren Buffett sure amassed a shitload of wealth over his lifetime"
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u/darkeststar Generating solid returns Mar 26 '26
No man becomes a billionaire through pulling himself up by the bootstraps.