Warren Buffett
Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway
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Modules
Biography
Known as the "Oracle of Omaha," Warren Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time.
Buffett chairs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns dozens of companies, including insurer Geico, battery maker Duracell and restaurant chain Dairy Queen. He retired as CEO at the end of 2025.
The son of a U.S. congressman, he first bought stock at age 11 and first filed taxes at age 13.
He has promised to donate over 99% of his wealth. So far, he has given away nearly $65 billion, mostly through the Gates Foundation and his kids' foundations.
In 2010, he and Bill Gates launched the Giving Pledge, asking other billionaires to commit to donating at least half of their fortunes to charitable causes.
Financial Assets
The Great Lie of Mega-Fortunes: The Case of Warren Buffett
Billionaires are often presented under the romantic myth of the 'self-made person': a narrative designed to justify opulence as the natural reward for hard work, effort, or ingenuity. However, when confronting such extreme volumes of wealth with macroeconomic reality, the meritocracy narrative completely breaks down. No individual can legitimately generate through personal effort a fortune equivalent to millions of times the average working-class salary. Capital at the top does not grow because of exceptional talent; it expands through an implacable dynamic where accumulated money works exponentially faster than people, devouring the wealth generated by productive labor.
The immense fortune of Warren Buffett, linked to Finance & Investments and 'Berkshire Hathaway', has not been built in a free-market vacuum, but through rent-seeking, the use of exclusive elite influence, the consolidation of monopoly positions, or inherited wealth. Far from taking real private risks, billionaire empires structurally depend on state support through direct subsidies, infrastructure use, exploitation of R&D, public contracts, and offshore tax engineering. While this wealth is equivalent to the physical weight of 992 tons of pure gold, the rest of the planet suffers from an artificial scarcity of basic resources. The fact that this wealth is enough to fully fund the public health system of DR Congo, a country with more than 105800000 million inhabitants for 64.7 years, proves that unlimited accumulation is not an entrepreneurial achievement, but the hijacking of democratic sovereignty.