is going to tell you about his secrets.

"Warren Buffett." It's the sound of money.

$9.2 billion... Billionaire investor Warren Buffett,

the second richest man in America.

He's estimated to be worth about $62 billion.

That makes him the richest man in the world.

♪ ♪

You know, Buffett is not exactly what you might expect.

Even though he's in the money business,

he doesn't even own a calculator or a computer.

He takes the long view,

and it's made him billions, many billions.

Maybe you can beat the house,

but I don't think you can beat Warren Buffett.

Buffett filed his first tax return at 13 years old.

But he's no average billionaire, Tom.

No, he certainly isn't, Matt.

He's a $44 billion average Joe.

Warren Buffett has an approach

that doesn't make him very popular with his fellow billionaires.

Warren Buffett, the boy from Nebraska

who grew up to become the Wizard of Omaha.

What was it about him that allowed him to become

the richest man in the world? How did he do it?

♪ ♪

70 years ago, I was in high school.

Almost a third as long as the country has been around.

And when I was in high school,

I really only had two things on my mind...

girls and cars.

And-- and I wasn't doing very well with girls,

so we'll talk about cars.

But lets just imagine that when we finish,

I'm going to let each one of you pick out the car of your choice.

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Pick it out, any color, you name it,

it'll be tied up with a bow, and it'll be at your house tomorrow.

And you say, "Well, what's the catch?"

And the catch is...

that it's the only car you're going to get in your lifetime.

Now what are you going to do, knowing that that's the only car

you're ever going to have and you love that car?

You're going to take care of it like you cannot believe.

Now what I'd like to suggest

is that you're not going to get only one car in your lifetime,

but you're gonna get one body and one mind,

and that's all you're going to get.

And that body and mind feels terrific now,

but it has to last you a lifetime.

I'm on the way to the office.

It's all of a five-minute drive.

Been doing it...

for 54 years.

One of the good things about this five-minute drive

is that on the way there's a McDonald's, so I'll pick up something.

Good morning, thank you for choosing McDonald's.

Go ahead and order whenever you're ready.

I'll have a Sausage McMuffin with egg and cheese.

Anything else? That's it, thank you.

Yeah, and I tell my wife as I shave in the morning,

I say either $2.61, $2.95, or $3.17,

and she puts that amount in a little cup by me here

and that determines which of three breakfasts I get.

Hi. 2.95. Okay, 2.95.

There's the two. How you doing, sir!

Hey, great! You're on "Candid Camera"!

I see. Hello, everybody!

When I'm not feeling quite so prosperous,

I might go with a 2.61, which is two sausage patties,

and then I put 'em together and pour myself a Coke.

Hi, how are you? Hi. I've been good.

3.17 is a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit,

but the market's down this morning,

so I think I'll pass up the 3.17 and go with the 2.95.

♪ ♪

I like numbers.

It started before I could remember.

It just felt good, working with numbers.

I was always playing around with numbers in one-way or another.

And it was fun to have a bunch of guys over

and have them betting on which marble would reach the drain first.

I had a lot of energy as a kid.

I-- I was inquisitive, and I was the youngest one

always in the class, 'cause I'd skip.

I've always been competitive.

I liked to read more than most kids.

I really like to read a lot.

My Aunt Edie gave me a copy of "The World Almanac"

and that was heaven to me.

And I can still tell you that Omaha's population was 214,006 in 1930.

Some numbers just kind of stick with you.

And very early, probably when I was seven or so,

I took this book out of the Benson Library

called "A Thousand Ways to Make a $1,000."

And one of the ways in this book

was having penny weighing machines.

And I sat and calculated how much it would cost

to buy the first weighing machine,

and then how long it would take for the profit

from that one to buy another one, and I would sit there

and create these compound interest tables

to figure out how long it would take me to have

a weighing machine for every person in the world.

I had everybody in the country weighing themselves ten times a day,

and me just sitting there like John D. Rockefeller of weighing machines.

The allowance when I was a little boy was a nickel a week,

but I liked the idea of having a little more than a nickel a week to work with,

and I went into business very early.

I started selling Coca-Cola door to door.

I sold gum door to door.

I sold "Saturday Evening Post,"

"Liberty" magazine, "Ladies Home Journal," you name it.

I think I enjoyed the game almost right from the start.

But I like being my own boss.

That's one thing I liked about delivering papers.

I could arrange the route I wanted.

Nobody was bothering me at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning.

I was delivering 500 papers a day,

and I made a penny a paper, but in terms of compounding,

that penny's turned into something else.

♪ ♪

Einstein is reputed to have said that "Compound interest

is the eighth wonder of the world" or something like that,

and it goes back to that story you probably learned when you were in grade school

where somebody did something for the king,

and the king said, "What can I do for you?"

And he said, "Well, lets take a chessboard

"and put one kernel of wheat on the first square

"and then double it on the second

and double it on the third."

And the king readily agreed to it, and by the time he figured out

what two to the 64th amounted to,

he was giving away the entire kingdom.

So it's a pretty simple concept, but over time,

it accomplishes extraordinary things.

Berkshire is an amazing company.

Fourth largest company in the "Fortune" 500.

He is the only person who has ever, from scratch,

built a company that is in the top 10 of the Fortune 500.

Berkshire Hathaway. Fine, thank you.

Well, Berkshire is a holding company of sorts.

It owns a large number of separate businesses

that operate independently of each other

and, to a great extent, from the parent company, Berkshire Hathaway.

All right, well, we're going to get more from you in a second.

So we have maybe 70, maybe 80 businesses,

and we ask them to behave in a way

that doesn't hurt our reputation

at Berkshire Hathaway, but they run their own lives.

Other people do most of the decorating in the office, so various things come in.

Originally, when I moved in in 1962...

you can see this--

I went down to the South Omaha Library,

and I think for a dollar, I got seven copies

of old "New York Times"

from big times like the Panic of 1907.

This is one-- 1929 obviously.

But I wanted to put on the walls

days of extreme panic in Wall Street,

just as a reminder that anything can happen in this world.

I mean it--

it's instructive art you can call it.

♪ ♪

I was born in 1930 here in Omaha, Nebraska,

during the stock market crash.

My dad lost his job in 1931, a year after I was born.

He was a stock salesman,

and he had what little savings he had in the bank,

and so he started his own company.

He worked right through the depression.

♪ ♪

He had an investment company,

and as an adult when I looked back,

I thought, "Wow, did that ever take a lot of nerve."

Sometimes we'd go down there on Sunday,

and we could play with the adding machine.

My brother and I tended to play the games together.

And I remember at one point he said to me,

"I'm going to be a millionaire by the time I'm... 30," or something like that.

It was totally outside of anything my family had experienced,

but he just was unusual that way.

Well, I was the oldest,

and then my brother and then my sister.

And my father would go to New York periodically

to check on businesses, stocks, and things like that,

and he'd come back, he'd always have a costume

for each of us, and Warren loved it.

He was very good-natured. He was quiet.

It was hard to tell he was a genius at that point,

but I mean, who was looking?

The first books I read on investment

were actually in my dad's office.

Pretty soon, I read all the books in the office

and read some of them more than once.

My dad had various nicknames for me.

He'd call me "Fireball" sometimes,

because I'd start little businesses.

He didn't care about money at all.

He believed very much in having an inner scorecard

and never worry about what other people are thinking about you.

You know, just-- just--

if you know why you're doing what you're doing, that's good enough.

I admired everything about him to the extent

that I was absorbing lessons from him without knowing it.

And the idea that all lives have equal value is something that

all three of his children felt since I can remember.

My dad at one point ran for congress

when I was 12 or so.

It was a very republican household.

I campaigned for him. My sisters campaigned for him.

The whole family did.

My mother was very, very bright,

and she was very gregarious. She was a good campaigner for my dad.

She had a lot of ambition,

and I think my brother Warren got a lot

of his extreme competitiveness from my mother, actually.

She was brilliant at math.

You know, I guess they still had these things

where you crank them and things added up,

and she could add it in her head faster than the machine could do it.

She was absolutely amazing in that.

She was very dutiful about taking care of the kids,

but you didn't get the same feeling of-- of love.

It was there, but it just-- it didn't come out the same way as with my dad.

Howard Buffett, Sr. On radio: In the nation, the only permanent way

to prosperity is a balanced budget.

Unless that goal is achieved,

all post-war plans will collapse like Hitler's conquest.

You have heard Congressman Howard L.H. Buffett,

a Republican member of the House of Representatives

from Nebraska speaking on the--

When I was about 12 or 13,

we moved to Washington, my family, and I was mad.

I was having fun in Omaha, and I lost all my friends,

and now I moved to a town where they were all strange,

and so I was very, very unhappy.

♪ ♪

At school, I just lost interest.

I took pleasure in tormenting my teachers.

At that time for example, AT&T was the stock

that all teachers owned for their retirement,