“The dumbest stock I ever bought was—drum roll here—Berkshire Hathaway,” Buffett told CNBC’s Squawk Box back in 2010.

It was 1962 when the “Oracle of Omaha” caught wind of cheap stock at a textile company that had been “going downhill for years”: Berkshire Hathaway. It had once been a huge business, and after every mill they closed, the company would use the proceeds to buy back their stock. Buffett planned to buy the shares cheaply, then sell them back to the company when it bought shares from investors. He figured Berkshire would soon shut another mill, giving him a chance to tender his shares for a small profit.

Buffett agreed to sell his shares for $11.50 each, but when the official offer arrived, Berkshire’s CEO at the time—Seabury Stanton—said the price was $11.375. The roughly 12-cent snub over the agreed-upon price set Buffett down the path to buy the future foundation of his fortune.

“This made me mad,” Buffett recalled. “So I went out and started buying the stock, and I bought control of the company, and fired Mr. Stanton.”

Buying Berkshire Hathaway and turning it into a $1.08 trillion titan of industry

In hindsight, buying the struggling textile business turned out to be one of the most formative decisions of Buffett’s career—but in the moment, it felt like anything but the smart choice. Textile assets “weren’t that good,” the legendary investor recounted, and trying to keep it afloat felt like carrying an anchor. 

“I had now committed a major amount of money to a terrible business,” Buffett said in the CNBC interview. “And Berkshire Hathaway became the base for everything pretty much that I’ve done since.”

A few years later, in 1967, Buffett acquired insurance company National Indemnity for Berkshire Hathaway. And over time, it continued to fold more business into the operations, acquiring or taking major stakes in businesses including GEICO, See’s Candies, BNSF Railway, and Precision Castparts. 

Buffett spent 20 years of his Berkshire tenure trying to keep the New England fabric manufacturer alive before it inevitably shut down in 1985. And looking back, the investor said that his holding business could’ve been worth $200 billion more than it actually was if he had skipped the textile company and put that money into insurance instead.

“Instead of putting that money into the textile business originally, we just started out with the insurance company, Berkshire would be worth twice as much as it is now,” Buffett said. 

Still, the company Buffett once viewed as a costly mistake ultimately became the vehicle through which he built his fortune. Berkshire’s businesses now span insurance, railroads, utilities and energy, manufacturing, and retail. In 2025, the conglomerate generated $371.4 billion in revenue, and finished the year off with $717.4 billion in shareholders’ equity.

From the time Buffett took control in 1965 through the end of 2024, Berkshire’s stock had grown more than 5.5 million percent, according to the company’s annual report.

Today, Berkshire has a market capitalization of roughly $1.1 trillion—one of the world’s largest publicly traded companies, born from a “dumb” stock purchase. 

Buffett has a $145 billion fortune thanks to his “dumbest” stock decision—but he’s giving much of it away

The 96-year-old entrepreneur may be well-known for living in a modest Nebraska home and clipping McDonald’s coupons, but Buffett’s bank account doesn’t exactly match his lifestyle. 

Thanks to the success of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is the tenth richest person in the world with a net worth of $145 billion. 

“Roughly 99-and-a-half percent” of his fortune stems from his interest in Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett said in 2024; he owns around 37.2% of the Class A shares and less than 0.001% of the Class B shares, according to a July 2026 filing. 

The company’s investments in over 60 businesses—including Dairy Queen, Coca-Cola, and American Express—have delivered an average annual return of 19.7% since 1965, according to its 2025 annual report. 

For all the billions Buffett has amassed, he’s famously reluctant to spend them on himself—so he’s passing it out to others. 

As the cofounder of charitable campaign The Giving Pledge alongside Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, Buffett has promised to give away more than 99% of his wealth to charity. 

Earlier this year, it was also announced that Buffett would be donating 12 million of his Class B Berkshire shares to philanthropic causes, amounting to around $6 billion. And in whittling down the rest of his massive Fortune, the remaining $139 billion in shares will be dished out to organizations run by his family by 2034.