Why Are Young Billionaires So Boring?
An earlier generation of American CEOs had to scramble to survive, but it’s harder than ever to build something from nothing.
Early in Warren Buffett’s life, his father failed to get hired at the family grocery store during the Great Depression. Without a job, and without any money after a run on the banks, the family of four ran up a tab of grocery bills at the store to put food on the table, and even then, his mother sometimes skipped meals. Leila Buffett, beset by stress and with a mind likely impacted by linotype fumes she inhaled as a child, would often berate her two small children.
From this nadir, the family gradually achieved more secure financial footing. His father started a stock brokerage and eventually went on to become a four-term congressman. Young Warren started showing an aptitude for numbers. He became obsessed with timing everything, calculating odds, even tallying the frequency of the letters that appeared in the bible most frequently, according to The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. By age 15 he managed to earn thousands working his local paper route. The rest, as they say, is history.