Warren Buffett

He married Susan Thompson in 1952. The couple had three children. Susan left him in 1977 to pursue her own career and started living separately. They never divorced and remained legally married till Susan’s death in 2004.

He married his longtime partner, Astrid Menks in 2006; the couple had known each other from the time his first wife left him.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in April 2012 and has successfully completed his treatment.

He was one of the three children of Howard and Leila Buffett. He had two sisters. His father was a four-term U.S. congressman.

He started his education at the Rose Hill Elementary School before shifting to Alice Deal Junior High School. He graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1947.

He had acute business sense even as a small child; he used to earn money by selling chewing gum and soft drinks. As a teenager, he became involved in a number of money making ventures and also started saving and investing his money.

He enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 where he studied for two years. He shifted to University of Nebraska–Lincoln from where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in business administration.

He attended Columbia Business School and earned a Master of Science in economics in 1951. There he had the privilege of attending classes taught by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd.

He worked at his father’s company, Buffett-Falk & Co. from 1951 to 1954 as an investment salesman. By the age of 20, he had already amassed savings worth almost $10,000 in 1950 — this showed what an astute investor he was.

He was appointed at a starting salary of $12,000 a year at Benjamin Graham’s partnership in 1954. His boss was a difficult man to work with and expected strict adherence to conventional rules of investing which Buffett’s young mind questioned.

Benjamin Graham retired and closed his partnership in 1956. By this time Buffett had a large amount of personal savings with which he opened Buffett Partnership Ltd., an investment partnership in Omaha.

He started operating several other partnerships and by the end of the decade he had seven partnerships operating. He became a millionaire in 1962 as a result of his earnings from all his partnerships.

He merged all the partnerships into one and invested in a textile manufacturing firm called Berkshire Hathaway. He began purchasing the shares of Berkshire Hathaway aggressively during the early 1960s and eventually took over the control of the company.

He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011.

He is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and ranks among the world’s wealthiest people. Considered to be the most successful investor of the 20th century, he is also the biggest philanthropists of our times and had pledged to donate most of his fortunes to social causes.