Warren Edward Buffett
Warren Edward Buffett (b. August 30, 1930, Omaha, Nebraska) is an American investor, businessman and philanthropist.
Buffett has amassed an enormous fortune from astute investments, particularly through the company Berkshire Hathaway, of which he is the largest shareholder and CEO. With an estimated current net worth of around US$52 billion,he was ranked by Forbes as the third-richest person in the world as of April 2007, behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and telecom magnate Carlos Slim.
In June 2006, he made a commitment to give away his fortune to charity, with 83% of it going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The donation amounts to approximately $30 billion. Buffett's donation is said to be the largest in U.S. history. At the time of the announcement the donation was enough to more than double the size of the foundation.
Despite his immense wealth, Buffett is famous for his unpretentious and frugal lifestyle. When he spent $9.7 million of Berkshire's funds on a corporate jet in 1989, he jokingly named it "The Indefensible" because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. He continues to live in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha, Nebraska that he bought in 1958 for $31,500 (although he also owned a more expensive home in Laguna Beach, California which he sold in 2004).
His annual salary of about $100,000 is tiny by the standards of senior executive remuneration in other comparable companies. In an interview on CNBC, he mentioned that his annual salary is equal to the price of the Berkshire Hathaway Class A share price. CEOs in S&P 500 constituent companies averaged about $9 million compensation in 2003.
Warren Buffett is the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and is one of the world's wealthiest men. Buffett is known as "the Sage of Omaha" for his remarkable savvy in stock market investments and for the success of Berkshire Hathaway -- the textile company he acquired in 1965 and turned into a holding company for investments in many other businesses. Over the years Buffett bought stock in financial powerhouses like Coca-Cola, Geico Insurance, Gillette, and the Washington Post Company (where Buffett became a board member and close friend of Post head Katharine Graham). Berkshire Hathaway became famously successful: $1000 invested in the company in 1965 would have been worth over $5 million by the year 2000. By the 1980s Buffett was a regular in the Forbes annual list of the world's richest people, and by the late 1990s he was second in wealth only to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. In June of 2006, with his personal wealth valued at roughly $44 billion, Buffett announced plans to give 85% of his Berkshire stock over time to five charitable foundations, primarily theBill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
