By the time he stepped down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, Warren Buffett had built the company into a conglomerate worth more than $1 trillion and amassed a personal net worth of about $150 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
It’s a career that scarcely anyone could hope to emulate — though that hasn’t stopped people from asking the Oracle of Omaha for wealth-building advice.
Back in 1999, at Berkshire’s annual meeting, Buffett fielded a question from a shareholder on how to make $30 billion, Buffett’s approximate net worth at the time.
“Start young,” Buffett said, with a chuckle.
“We started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill,” he added. “So we started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course … the nature of compound interest is that it behaves like a snowball.”
