You don’t get a sense of how awesome, in the original sense of the word, that figure is until you translate the difference into actual dollars. A million dollars invested in the S&P from 1957 through 2007 would have been worth $166 million—but a million invested with Buffett would have been worth almost $81 billion. Fast forward another 18 years, and your $1 million with Buffett is now worth almost $428 billion.
This is where the legend of Buffett’s genius rightly springs. What is less well known, however, and even less discussed, is that these first five decades account for more than 100% of Buffett’s career outperformance. While he beat the S&P by a factor of almost 500 in his first fifty years, he has underperformed it in the eighteen years since. As the chart below shows, a million dollars invested in the S&P from the end of 2007 through mid-December 2025 would today be worth $6.6 million, almost 25% more than the $5.3 million you would have earned in Berkshire’s stock.
The data lead to an obvious conclusion. For most of the 21st century, Buffett’s record was mediocre—Salieriesque, one might say.
How could this happen? How could a practitioner as driven and imaginative as Warren Buffett produce such genius, then become slightly below average?
