Warren Buffett, who is worth $143 billion today and was once the richest man in the world, was once making mere pennies as a teenage paperboy.
The Oracle of Omaha filed his very first tax return in 1944 when he was just 14 years old for his earnings delivering newspapers in Washington, D.C. He owed just $7 in federal taxes, according to the two-page tax filing he shared with PBS News Hour in 2017.
Warren Buffet's 1944 tax return by PBS NewsHour
That year, he earned $592.50, just barely over the requirement at the time to file a return for gross income of $500 or more. Today, his earnings would be worth $11,244.32, and his taxes would equate to $132.84, according to CPI inflation data.
That’s a far cry from the $26.8 billion Buffett said his company Berkshire Hathaway paid in 2024 taxes, according to his annual shareholder letter. That was the highest-ever payment made to the U.S. government at the time.
But Buffett has never begrudgingly paid his taxes. Instead, he has long argued he doesn’t pay enough taxes. Before Buffett took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire “did not pay a dime of income tax,” which he called “an embarrassment.”
“That sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it’s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry,” Buffett wrote in the shareholder letter.
Warren Buffett got his start as a paperboy
Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930, in Omaha, the only son of Howard and Leila Buffett (he has two sisters). His father, Howard, a stockbroker and eventual four-term U.S. congressman, helped foster Warren’s fascination with business and markets. When Howard was elected to Congress, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., where a teenage Warren found work delivering newspapers.
Buffett delivered both morning and afternoon editions of the Washington Post and the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald, working a route that ran past the homes of six senators and one Supreme Court justice, he told PBS.
In 1944, he earned $364 from that route. Buffett, who had started investing at the ripe age of 11, also earned $228 in interest and dividends that year, having bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred stock. That brought his total income that year to $592.50.
Under IRS rules at the time, any U.S. citizen, including a minor, who earned $500 or more was required to file a federal return, and he paid just $7 in taxes.
The tax deductions of a 14-year-old Buffett
Just as any adult would do, Buffett made sure to write off his business expenses that year on his tax return. He attached a handwritten note documenting two business expenses: $10 for watch repair and $35 for miscellaneous bicycle costs. Buffett used both of these religiously on his morning paper route.
By deducting those costs, he lowered his taxable income like any seasoned entrepreneur or gig worker would, but he was only 14 years old at the time.
“I have paid federal income tax every year since 1944,” Buffett said in a 2016 statement responding to claims about his tax history. “Though, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year.”
From paperboy to billionaire
The newspaper route was just one of several early ventures for Buffett.
By the time he was 15, he had earned $2,000 from deliveries and spent $1,200 of it to purchase farmland in his home state of Nebraska, according to his 2008 biography, The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder. Buffett also reportedly had a profit-sharing agreement with the farmer.
He and a friend later bought a used pinball machine for $25, placed it in a barbershop, and within months had machines running in three locations across Washington, D.C. They sold the operation for $1,200.
“[I] built a small empire out of it,” he told Bill Gates on a visit to an Omaha candy store, not far from the site of Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meeting in 2018.
By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had accumulated $9,800 in savings. He went on to study under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School; launched his own investment partnership in 1956; and took control of a struggling textile manufacturer, Berkshire Hathaway, in the mid-1960s—transforming it into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Buffett retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway in late 2025, but he’s still worth $143 billion.
The boy who paid $7 grew up to say he wasn’t paying enough
The arc of Buffett’s relationship with the IRS is, by his own account, a strange one. The man who meticulously documented his bicycle repairs at 14 became, decades later, one of the most prominent voices arguing that people like himself are undertaxed.
He once pointed out that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek.
“Debbie works just as hard as I do, and she pays twice the rate I pay,” he told ABC News in 2012. “I think that’s outrageous.”
The contrast became so well-known that then-President Barack Obama proposed what became known as “the Buffett Rule,” which would have required individuals earning more than $1 million annually to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. The bill was blocked by a Republican filibuster in 2012.
Buffett continued to make the case publicly. At Berkshire Hathaway’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, he predicted that higher taxes were “quite likely,” citing fiscal policy, and criticized other companies for constantly scrutinizing the tax code for the smallest loopholes.
“[The government] may decide that someday they don’t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences,” Buffett said in 2024. “And they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they’ll take a larger percentage of what we earn, and we’ll pay it.”
