Isn’t it remarkable when one individual proves that anything is possible in the eight or nine decades we spend on this planet? While most pause to admire such stories, billionaire Warren Buffett got to work early, making the most of his time as a teenage paperboy earning pennies. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and an early one at that. In fact, Buffett has said he has paid federal income tax every year since 1944, when he was just 13, and that first return showed he owed only $7.
It is equally noteworthy that one of the world’s richest men for decades, now worth over $140 billion, still believes he doesn’t pay enough in taxes. Before Buffett took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire “did not pay a dime of income tax,” calling it “an embarrassment.” On a personal level, however, Buffett has kept his own taxable life unusually restrained. His annual salary has famously remained at $100,000 for decades, a negligible fraction of his vast fortune. The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway receives no dividend from the company, sells very little stock, and takes no bonus or equity-based compensation. In 2025, his total compensation stood at $389,488, largely attributed to security costs. Crucially, Berkshire has not paid a dividend since 1967, allowing Buffett’s wealth to compound quietly without triggering large annual tax liabilities.
Even in private life, Buffett has long resisted the visual language of billionaire excess. Reuters notes that he still lives in the same Omaha house he bought in 1958 for $31,500, and one of his most famous regular indulgences remains a modest McDonald’s breakfast. There is perhaps no greater paradox than the Oracle of Omaha. His personal taxes, while significant by ordinary standards, appear modest relative to his wealth. In 2015, he reported paying about $1.85 million in federal income taxes on $11.6 million of adjusted gross income. Yet between 2014 and 2018, Buffett’s wealth grew by roughly $24 billion while he paid about $24 million in taxes, a figure that has been described as a 0.1% “true tax rate.”
The story changes dramatically when viewed through the lens of Berkshire Hathaway. According to Fortune, in his 2024 shareholder letter, Buffett revealed that the company made four payments to the IRS totaling $26.8 billion for that year alone, which he described as the largest corporate income tax payment ever made to the U.S. government. He added that this accounted for roughly 5% of all corporate taxes paid in America. And if that number is staggering, Buffett also noted that since he took control in 1965, Berkshire’s cumulative cash income tax payments to the U.S. Treasury have exceeded $101 billion. Buffett did not become one of the richest men in history by earning more, but by structuring a life where wealth compounds quietly, while the empire he built pays on a scale few nations can rival.
