Warren Buffett

Buffett is an outlier among the wealth-delta profiles on this site: his cash salary from Berkshire Hathaway has famously stayed near $100,000 a year for decades, so almost the entire ~$3B figure here is unrealized appreciation in his Berkshire Class A and B shares, not income he draws. Berkshire pays no dividend, which means Buffett's paper wealth grows or shrinks purely with the stock price and the company's book value—there is no salary bump to smooth out a bad quarter for the stock.

Set beside Gates's diversified Cascade holdings, Buffett's fortune is a useful teaching contrast in concentration risk: essentially one company drives his entire number. That also makes his position easy to track through Berkshire's own SEC filings and shareholder letters, unlike privately held ventures such as SpaceX. Students can compare how a single-stock billionaire (Buffett), a multi-asset billionaire (Gates), and a founder-operator (Bezos) each produce similar-looking dollar figures through very different exposures.

Every year Buffett donates a large block of Berkshire shares—historically around 4-5% of his stake—mainly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and several family foundations, a commitment he has kept since 2006 and one that mechanically shrinks his own net worth even in years the stock rises. Berkshire also announced Greg Abel would succeed Buffett as CEO starting January 2026, a governance change that doesn't itself move the stock but is closely watched by the same filings this page's estimate depends on.

Berkshire's 10-K, 10-Q, and Buffett's annual shareholder letter are the primary sources for verifying his share count and Berkshire's book value; Forbes and Bloomberg layer daily stock-price marks on top of those filings to produce the real-time figures. This page's number is a smoothed annual average built the same way as the Gates and Bezos entries—useful for comparing order of magnitude, not for citing as Buffett's literal yearly take-home.