QuestionerMr. Buffett, how can I make $30 billion?
WarrenStart young. Charlie's 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 nature of compound interest is it behaves like a snowball, a sticky snow. And the trick is to have a very long hill, which means either starting very, younger, living very, to be very old. The, you know, 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 A's. I would start going right through companies, and I probably would focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller sums and there's more chance that something is overlooked in that arena. And as Charlie has said earlier, it won't be like doing that in 1951, when you could leaf through and find all kinds of things that just left off the page at you. But that's the only way to do it. I mean, you have to buy businesses, or little pieces of businesses called stocks, and you have to buy them at attractive prices, and you have to buy them you have to buy into good businesses. And that advice will be the same 100 years from now in terms of investing. That's what it's all about. And you can't expect anybody else to do it for you. I mean, people will not, they will not tell you about wonderful little investments. There's, it's, it's not the way the investment business is set up. When I first visited Geico in January of 1951, I subsequently went back to Columbia and I said that that rest of that year. I subsequently went down to Blythe and company and actually to one other firm that was a leading Geyer and company that was a leading analyst and insurance. And, you know, I thought I'd discovered this wonderful thing, and I'd see what these great investment houses that specialize in insurance stock said it. And they said, I didn't know what I was talking about. You know, it wasn't of any interest to them. You've got to follow your own, you know, you've got to learn what you know and what you don't know. And within the arena of what you know, you have to just, you have to, 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. you're talking about. You know, you have to, you have to think for yourself. And if you do, you'll find things.