Buffet Stock Market Investment Motivation - Warren Buffett Investing in Financial Success

Warren Buffett investing is topical when the stock market surges or crashes, when the Forbes list of richest people comes out and around Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings. Buffett is the elder statesman of American capitalism. He has risen to be the world’s third richest man with an estimated $47 billion as of March 2010 according to Forbes magazine,

At 79 years of age he is still running the Berkshire Hathaway Inc, a company, which he has almost all his fortune in. Buffett still lives in Omaha, Nebraska and runs Berkshire Hathaway from there. There are many books written about Buffett and his stock market secrets with a legion of fans aiming to emulate his successes.

People pay a fortune to play golf with him or have lunch with him in charity auctions. In the past five years or so he has entered less conservative domains such as selling the US dollar and buying up chunks of Goldman Sachs right after the Bear Stearns and Lehman collapses. While he doesn’t get it always right he has a pretty incredible record.

Warren Buffett’s public vehicle is Berkshire Hathaway Inc, which has a current market value of around US $189 billion. This is a long way from a struggling company that owned a textile mill that Buffett took over in 1965. 

Warren Buffett to this day is still the majority shareholder and has control of Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire's proxy filing of Feb. 28, 2010 shows Buffett’s holding as follows.

• Buffett owned 350,000 Class A shares of Berkshire this is equal to 33.3 percent of shares outstanding,
• Buffett owned 75,013,134 Class B shares, equal to 8.4 percent.
• Buffett owned 24.3 percent of Berkshire in aggregate and controlled 31.3 percent of the company's voting power.

Buffett has through a consistent plan of acquiring value, which Buffett calls ‘The snowball’. He has turned Berkshire into a holding company for eighty businesses. His plan and knowledge were outlined in, 'The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life,' was a best-selling biography released in 2008. The author was Alice Schroeder, a former insurance analyst.

Some of these businesses represent some of America’s household names.

• Geico  (Auto insurance)
• Burlington Northern Santa Fe (Railroad)
• General Re (Reinsurance)
• MidAmerican Energy (Power utility)
• Dairy Queen (Fast food)

Berkshire Hathaway also has substantial equity investments. At the end of 2009 they had $59 billion invested in stock markets. Some of these equity holdings are also household American names.

• American Express Co,
• Coca-Cola Co,
• Goldman Sachs
• Procter & Gamble Co and
• Wells Fargo & Co.

Buffett has said that upon his death his Berkshire Hathaway shareholding will be distributed to different philanthropies.

Buffett pledged 85 percent of his net worth in June 2006 to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four Buffett family charities. Other charities include Girls Inc, a social service agency and a charity out of San Francisco that offers programs for the homeless and destitute called the Glide Foundation.

Warren Buffett drinks five cans of Cherry Coke every day, not quite the apple a day keeps your creditors at bay.

One of Warren Buffets great attributes is his grounding despite the billions. For the last fifty years despite all the trappings of success he has lived in the same 10-room, five-bedroom home that sits on three-quarters of an acre in Omaha, Nebraska. Where his office still is just up the road. In 2009 Douglas County records show the house was assessed at $727,600.

Warren Buffett draws an annual salary of $100,000 to run Berkshire. This is a far cry for all the head honchos of Wall Street that oversaw the financial crisis!

Warren Buffett is often quoted as being a big fan of the ukulele and plays it in his spare time. Tiny Tim anyone?

This article is intended as just a quick introduction to a man whose sheer discipline and dogged determination has amassed a fortune. He is both a character and a man of immense generosity as evidenced by his charity efforts. Warren Buffett investing is more than about just making huge amounts of money it is also about how you make it and what to do with it. Many in corporate America forgot about those latter two points when greed took over