Warren Buffett, born in 1930, American financier, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., an investment company with corporate holdings in excess of $2 billion. Warren Edward Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended the University of Pennsylvania (1947-49). He later obtained business degrees from the University of Nebraska (1950) and Columbia University (1951). He worked as an investment salesman for his father's brokerage firm (1951-54) before moving to the Graham-Newman Corporation (1954-56), a portfolio-management company in New York City. At age 25 Buffett returned to Omaha and formed the Buffett Partnership, a limited-partnership investment fund that he managed with great success from 1956 until 1969, when he dissolved the fund just before the stock-market slump of the early 1970s. In 1969 he took over Berkshire Hathaway, a small textile company in Bedford, Massachusetts. To this base he added insurance companies, banks, steel-service companies, department stores, food companies, and news-media organizations. During the 1980s he became involved in merger arbitrage, helping to forge an agreement between the American Broadcasting Companies (see ABC, Inc.) and Capital Cities Communications in 1985 (effective 1986) that gave Berkshire Hathaway part ownership of Capital Cities/ABC, Inc. In 1987 he prevented corporate raiders from taking over Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street investment company, by buying 12 percent of the company. In 1989 he became the second largest stockholder in the Coca-Cola Company. He became interim chairman and chief executive of Salomon Brothers in 1991-92 during a shake-up resulting from illegal bond-market activities. He resigned from these offices and appointed successors when the federal government's investigation of Salomon Brothers was completed.

In 2006 Buffett revealed his intention to donate $37 billion, a large proportion of his fortune, to charity—mostly to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.