Warren Buffett

From Philosopedia

Warren Edward Buffett (30 August 1930 - )

Buffett was born in Omaha to Howard Homan and Leila (Stahl) Buffett. Susan Thompson, his first wife who died in 2004, was the daughter of a Disciples of Christ minister and a theist. Their children are homemaker Susan, photographer Howard, and musician Peter Buffett.

Buffett attended the University of Pennsylvania, 1947 to 1949, the University of Nebraska in 1950, and received his Master of Science from Columbia University in 1951.

Buffett, 76 in August 2006, merged with Astrid Menks, 60, at his daughter's Omaha, Nebraska home. The two had been together for decades, and his first wife had approved of their relationship, having introduced them. The 15-minute civil ceremony was followed by a seafood dinner with friends.

Mary Buffett, who was married to Warren's son Peter for twelve years, wrote The Tao of Warren Buffett (2006) with David Clark. She cited some of the entrepreneur's wry sayings:

• You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because some day a fool will.
• It's hard to teach a young dog old tricks.

Buffett was called by Forbes the world's second richest man from 2001 to 2006. In 2008 because his fortune had grown to $62,000,000,000., Forbes named Buffett the world's richest.

He is an entrepreneur who is chairman of the board of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., a corporation the stock of which reached over $80,000 per share in 1996 and $90,000 in 2006. Since 1968 he has been a life trustee of Iowa’s Grinnell College.

Buffett became an agnostic when very young, avoids houses of worship, and tells people his concerns are entirely secular. Roger Lowenstein, in Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (1995), found that the financier “did not subscribe to his family’s religion. Even at a young age he was too mathematical, too logical, to make a leap of faith. He adopted his father’s ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity.”

Asked in 1997 if he was a supernaturalist or a naturalist, a believer or a non-believer, Buffett responded to Warren Allen Smith on a postcard,

• Agnostic.

"The nice thing about an agnostic,"� Buffet has said, "is you don't think anybody is wrong."

{The New York Times, 9 May 19 97; WAS, 13 February 1997}