In 1944, Warren Buffett was 14 years old and already thinking about what to do with the money he’d earned delivering newspapers.
According to Forbes, the future billionaire saved about $1,200 from his paper route and other childhood ventures when he made a remarkably grown-up purchase: 40 acres of Nebraska farmland.
It was an early investment for the Omaha native, who would go on to become one of the world’s richest people and one of its most prominent philanthropists.
Buffett’s fascination with business began even earlier. He purchased his first stock at age 11. As a boy, he also sold chewing gum, Coca-Cola and magazines door-to-door before taking on newspaper routes.
By his teens, Buffett was delivering hundreds of newspapers a day. The work was lucrative enough that he filed his first tax return at 13, famously claiming a deduction for the bicycle and watch he used on his route.
The following year, he put some of his savings into something considerably larger.
Buffett paid about $1,200 for 40 acres of farmland in Nebraska and arranged for a tenant farmer to work the property, according to accounts of his early life. Rather than simply spending his newspaper earnings, the teenager had turned them into an asset capable of producing more income.
It was a remarkably early glimpse of the investing philosophy that would eventually make Buffett a household name.
Buffett went on to study at the University of Nebraska before earning a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University, where he studied under famed value investor Benjamin Graham.
In the decades that followed, Buffett transformed Berkshire Hathaway from a struggling textile company into a massive conglomerate with holdings and investments spanning insurance, railroads, energy, manufacturing and some of America’s most recognizable companies.
His investing success earned him the nickname the “Oracle of Omaha” and built a fortune Forbes estimates at roughly $145 billion.
But Buffett has spent years making plans for that fortune to eventually leave his hands.
In 2006, Buffett announced that he would gradually give away the overwhelming majority of his Berkshire Hathaway shares to philanthropic foundations.
Four years later, Buffett joined Bill and Melinda French Gates in launching the Giving Pledge, an effort encouraging the world’s wealthiest people to commit the majority of their fortunes to charitable causes.
Buffett went considerably further than the pledge’s basic requirement.
“More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death,” Buffett wrote in his Giving Pledge letter.
He has already donated tens of billions of dollars worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares over the past two decades, making him one of the largest individual charitable donors in history.
In recent years, Buffett has also laid out what will happen to his remaining wealth after his death. His three children will oversee a charitable trust tasked with distributing the money, with Buffett making clear that he does not intend to create a multigenerational dynasty from his fortune.
It’s an extraordinary trajectory for money that started accumulating one newspaper at a time.
At 14, Buffett took $1,200 he’d earned and saved and turned it into 40 acres of farmland. More than eight decades later, after turning those early instincts into one of the world’s largest fortunes, he’s preparing to send nearly all of it back out the door.
Related: In 1904, Lizzie Magie Patented a Board Game Warning Against Greedy Landlords; 31 Years Later, She Got $500 For It and Another Man Became a Millionaire Selling It as Monopoly
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