Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2013; time references such as ‘more than 60 years ago’ are counted from that year, and Charlie Munger, described as Buffett’s co-pilot at Berkshire Hathaway, died in November 2023.
The first time someone told me there were rumours that Warren Buffett had been a thief before becoming the best investor on the planet, I thought they meant what people always say about the rich: that nobody gets rich honestly. But that’s not what they were getting at.
Warren Buffett was indeed, if not a thief, then at least a “delinquent” for a while, a period in which he went as far as stealing things.
Put like that, many people will picture Buffett in a balaclava raiding a petrol station, but as with almost everything in Buffett’s story, there’s a positive message we can take from it. Buffett himself admitted in his authorised biography, The Snowball, written by Alice Schroeder, that as a teenager he felt lost and fell in with the wrong people.
He admits that he went as far as stealing from the ground floor of a store (golf clubs, golf balls and bags, among other things) until he saw clearly that he was heading down the wrong path.
(See: Warren Buffett documentary: inside the mind of a genius)
We’re talking about something that happened more than 60 years ago, and nobody would know about it today if Buffett hadn’t told the woman writing his biography himself, knowing full well that the book would be read by millions of people around the world. But that’s what this legendary investor is like.
Buffett has talked about the importance of choosing carefully the people you surround yourself with, of always working with the best and, above all, of working with people of integrity and honesty.
Buffett tells of a man in Omaha who used to say that, when hiring people, he looked for three things: integrity, intelligence and energy, and that if a person didn’t have the first, the other two were worthless.
He also said that having only the first quality wouldn’t get you anywhere either, because if you’re not intelligent and energetic, you’re dumb and lazy. That’s why Buffett’s co-pilot at Berkshire Hathaway is Charlie Munger, a great investor of the same age as Buffett, a man of integrity who is true to his principles.
As he said in the Bloomberg interview where he talked about luck in life and in business, there is a great deal of chance in the way we come into this world, but how we move forward depends on the decisions we make.
As we can see, anyone can go off the rails at some point, but they can also make the decisions that bring them back onto the right path. So if you have a child who is a bit rebellious and lost, remember that they could still be the next Warren Buffett.
Further reading
Featured image: Alejandrocuadro, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
