Tycoons Weekly Update

# 2 Warren Buffett

Last years #1 settle for second place

American investor Warren Buffett was last year’s world # 1 richest man. This year he become the # 2 richest man of the world after losing $25 billion in 12 months as his one of the main source Berkshire Hathaway’s shares down by 45%.

American financier, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Warren Buffett, born in 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska, and attended the University of Pennsylvania (1947-49). He later obtained Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Nebraska Lincoln (1950) and Master of Science from Columbia University (1951).

From 1951 to 1954, Buffett worked as an investment salesman for his father’s brokerage firm, a portfolio-management company in New York City. Then he moves to the Graham-Newman Corporation in 1954 and he was there up to 1956. When he was 25, he 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.

This was his first strong base, from where latter on he added holding company invested in insurance (Geico, General Re), jewelry (Borsheim’s), utilities (MidAmerican Energy), food companies (Dairy Queen, See’s Candies).banks, steel-service companies, department stores and news-media organizations. Also has non controlling stakes in Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, and Wells Fargo. During the 1980s he became involved in merger arbitrage, helping to forge an agreement between the American Broadcasting Companies (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.

Source: Encyclopedia