Warren Buffett got lucky — or at least that's what he says.
The legendary investor and Berkshire Hathaway chairman underlined just how fortunate he's been during a rare interview aired by CNBC on Wednesday.
Buffett said that "out of eight billion people, I may be one of the 10 luckiest in the world."
He's lucky to be alive and healthy at age 95, he said. While he's "losing marbles at this point," he quipped, he "accumulated marbles for a longer time than I deserved, and that's just a matter of luck."
Buffett also said he's blessed that the field he's passionate about and has a natural talent for — investing — has been so much more lucrative than if he'd been a "great violin player or anything else."
The business icon — who has a net worth approaching $150 billion despite giving away more than half of his Berkshire stock — said it was an "accident" that he gained early exposure to the world of finance thanks to his stockbroker father.
"If my father had been a plumber," he said, "I would not have had the same advantage I had."
Buffett added that he and his family have seen how "unbelievably unlucky some people have been," and those bad things "just didn't happen to us."
The storied stockpicker, who retired as Berkshire's CEO at the turn of the year, transformed a failing textile mill into a $1 trillion conglomerate. He oversaw a nearly 20% compounded annual gain in Berkshire's stock price between 1965 and 2025 — roughly double the S&P 500's gain over the same period.
Buffett's success is often attributed to his patience, discipline, and prudence as an investor, but he told CNBC that the stock market provided a nice tailwind.
"America has been a wonderful place to invest money," he said, noting the Dow Jones Industrial Average has skyrocketed from 100 points when he bought his first stock at age 11, to roughly 52,000 points.
"The village idiot could have made it from that point forward," Buffett joked about his early start, adding that he's been "in the right game."
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Theron Mohamed is a London-based correspondent on the Trending team at Business Insider. His coverage spans finance, investing, wealth, markets, and the economy.Theron joined BI in 2019 as a reporter at Markets Insider and rose to the rank of correspondent before moving to the Trending team in 2024. He previously covered tech, media, and telecom stocks for Investors Chronicle magazine and had a brief stint on the Financial Times' Data team. He interned at the Wall Street Journal in New York where he primarily wrote for Heard on the Street.Theron has freelanced for The Independent, The Telegraph, WIRED, and several smaller publications. He holds an undergraduate degree in geography from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.Theron often covers Warren Buffett, Michael Burry, Jeremy Grantham and other top-flight investors. He also writes about the world's wealthiest people and shares financial advice from all manner of rich and successful people.Email Theron at [email protected] and follow him on X @theron_mohamed.Expertise
- Corporate finance
- Stocks and investing
- Wealth and philanthropy
- Business history
- US economy
- Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway
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