Warren Buffett Was Asked How To Get Rich. He Explained Exactly How He'd Turn $10,000 Into $30 Billion If He Had To Start Over In His 30s

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Most people ask safe questions at shareholder meetings. One man in New York didn't. He stood up at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting and asked Warren Buffett what everyone really wanted to know:

"My question is, if you are starting out again today in your early 30s, what would you do differently or the same in today's environment to replicate your success? In short, Mr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion?"

The crowd laughed. But the question hit home. At the time, Buffett was worth roughly that amount. Fast forward to 2025 and he's now sitting on over $145 billion, which makes the question seem even more justified.

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Buffett didn't waste time. "Start young," he replied. That was the first rule.

He credited his early start and long runway — not just skill, but time — for building what he called a snowball. "Longtime Buffett business partner Charlie's [Munger] always said that the big thing about it is we started building this little snowball on top of a very long hill. So we started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down. And, of course, the snowball—the nature of compound interest is it behaves like a snowball of sticky snow. And the trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very young or living very—to be very old."

If he were starting again today with just $10,000, he wouldn't change his method. "I would do it exactly the same way if I were doing it in the investment world. I mean, if I were getting out of school today and I had $10,000 to invest, I'd start with the As. I would start going right through companies. And I probably would focus on smaller companies, because that would be working with smaller sums and there's more chance that something is overlooked in that arena."

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That's how he found Geico in 1951. And when he tried to bring the idea to major investment firms, they told him he didn't know what he was talking about. That lesson stuck. "You can't expect anybody else to do it for you. I mean, people will not tell—they will not tell you about wonderful little investments. It's not the way the investment business is set up."

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"You've got to follow your own—you've got to learn what you know and what you don't know. Within the arena of what you know, you have to just—you have to pursue it very vigorously and act on it when you find it. And you can't look around for people to agree with you. You can't look around for people to even know what you're talking about. You know, you have to think for yourself. And if you do, you'll find things."

Then he turned it over to Munger, Buffett's longtime business partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. And he didn't try to oversell the dream.

"The hard part of the process for most people is the first $100,000. If you have a standing start at zero, getting together $100,000 is a long struggle for most people."

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But those who do it, Munger said, usually share three qualities: "I would argue that the people who get there relatively quickly are helped if they're passionate about being rational, very eager and opportunistic, and steadily underspend their income grossly. I think those three factors are very helpful."

Buffett closed the moment with a line that still holds weight: "That advice will be the same a hundred years from now, in terms of investing. That's what it's all about."

Whether you're trying to hit $100K or imagining billions, the strategy doesn't change. Good businesses. Smart prices. Your own judgment. No one's going to hand it to you. But if you roll your snowball long enough, the math eventually takes care of the rest.

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This article Warren Buffett Was Asked How To Get Rich. He Explained Exactly How He'd Turn $10,000 Into $30 Billion If He Had To Start Over In His 30s originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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