The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

The Snowball is hands down the best biography I have read in a long time. Warren Buffet comes off as one of the most interesting and wholesome individuals this world has ever known. Buffett seems to have found himself at the perfect intersection of privilege, luck and genius, in that order. I loved this book and it should be the top non-ficiton book on your to-read list.  

However.

It seems that most people that learn about Warren Buffett walk away with the wrong message, Buffett is not simply a great stock picker, that is not the story to be told. The real story of Warren Buffett is that he was able to attract more capital investments to himself and his organizations than anyone else in the history of the World because he was seen as a very trustworthy person. What gets forgotten about Warren Buffett is the reason he was so trustworthy is because he was born in the very upper-most echelons of American culture with a Senator father and a wealthy extended family going back generations.

Warren Buffett is indeed not a normal human being, but only because he can afford to be different. it is disgusting to me that the first and only thing that people are not talking about Warren Buffett about is the fact that he came from wealth and power and was able to accumulate more wealth and power, in my book that's barely an accomplishment. Buffett is a near inevitable outcome of his circumstance, nothing more.

Warren Buffett's family owned the largest grocery store chain in the state when he was born. Warren Buffett's father was a US senator. He was able to attend the best schools in the country when he even admittedly applied to graduate school with bad grades no recommendations only days before school started and all he had was the Buffett name to go on.

Becuase of all this privildge Buffett is now FAMOUSLY a stingly asshole to his own children, because of the massive guilt he must suffer from, he is well known for making a show of not giving to “charity” cases or his children, so he can act as if he believes the only way to make one’s way in the world is to start at the bottom and work your way up. The man is a hypocrite of the worst kind, a “pull the ladder up behind you” kind of rich man. By his own account, he pays just over 14% income tax, lower than the vast majority of middle class Americans. 

Warren Buffett went from being one of the most privileged people in America to being the richest person in America. The key to Warren Buffett’s success was not his investment acumen, as he himself describes is extremely straight forward, what made Warren Buffett a success was that he started wealthy, had an ability to solicit millions of dollars from rich connections for his business ideas and then plow “excess money” into stable long-term investments starting at a very young age.

No other 20 year old in this day and age would be able to attract multi-million dollars investors into their projects and ideas without having some sort of very strong connections and in Warren's case it was his father being a wealthy senator. Still in his twenties Warren buffett's investment company had a policy to not disclose anything about how Warren was investing people's money he would only give them a once yearly report on how the investment did, today that would be an incredibly shady proposition.

Now that I've done my best to shit on Warren Buffett's lifetime of achievement I do want to say this was an incredible book I loved hearing about Warren Buffett every second of his life is interesting to me he is a beautiful human being and if everybody could be a little bit more like Warren Buffett this world could be a better place.

My only point is that Warren Buffett is an anomaly, not a one in a million stock picker, but a 1 percenter that leveraged his father's game and connections to solicit huge amounts of money at a very young age and invest it very conservatively over a long period of time.