Warren Buffett

Early life and education

Warren Edward Buffett was born August 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska. His father Howard Buffett was a stockbroker and later a U.S. congressman. Buffett showed an early interest in business and numbers, selling chewing gum, soft drinks, and newspapers as a boy and filing his first tax return as a teenager after earning money from a paper route and pinball machines placed in barbershops.

He studied at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to the University of Nebraska, where he completed his undergraduate degree. He then attended Columbia Business School, where he studied under Benjamin Graham, the founder of value investing, whose framework shaped Buffett's entire approach to markets.

None of this educational record includes a published IQ score. A precocious head for business and an early grasp of numbers are consistent with high ability, but they are biographical facts, not psychometric measurements, and they do not produce a specific number.

Career and investing record

After working briefly for Benjamin Graham's firm, Buffett returned to Omaha and ran investment partnerships through the 1950s and 1960s. He took control of Berkshire Hathaway, then a struggling textile manufacturer, in 1965 and gradually transformed it into a diversified holding company spanning insurance, railroads, energy, consumer brands, and large equity stakes in public companies.

Over the following decades Berkshire compounded shareholder capital at a rate that placed Buffett among the most successful investors on record. He became widely known for a disciplined value-investing philosophy, a long holding horizon, and plain-spoken annual shareholder letters. In philanthropy, he pledged the large majority of his fortune to charitable causes and co-founded the Giving Pledge with Bill and Melinda Gates in 2010.

This record reflects discipline, patience, rationality, and a consistent framework applied over a long career. It does not depend on, or reveal, any particular IQ figure.

The IQ question and where the number comes from

The figure of about 150 - and other figures in a similar range across different posts - appears widely on "celebrity IQ" list sites and social media. None of these sources cite a named test (Stanford-Binet, WAIS, Mensa-administered Cattell, etc.), a date, an examiner, or a documented administration. The numbers are presented without provenance.

This is the standard pattern for living-celebrity IQ figures: list-makers work backwards from a person's visible achievements to a plausible-sounding round number. That reasoning is psychometrically invalid. IQ is defined as a normed position relative to a population on a specific instrument; it cannot be inferred from a track record. A person can build an extraordinary investment record without anyone ever having measured their IQ - and in Buffett's case, no one publicly has.

What makes Buffett unusual is that he has, in plain terms, argued against the idea that a high IQ drives investment success. He has said that investing does not require an exceptional intellect and that beyond a reasonable baseline, additional IQ points add little; in his framing, what matters more is temperament - the discipline to control emotion and act rationally when others do not. Absent a published, named, dated test result, the honest answer to "what is Warren Buffett's IQ" is: unknown - there is no measurement.

Why celebrity IQ numbers are usually wrong

Three recurring problems make figures like this unreliable:

• No instrument. A score has no meaning without the test it came from. A 150 on a high-ceiling research test is a different population position than a 150 on the WAIS-IV.
• No administration. Real scores come from a documented sitting: where, when, scored by whom. Celebrity figures have none of this.
• Reverse inference. Assigning an IQ based on someone being successful is circular - it assumes the conclusion (high ability) and dresses it up as a measurement. This is especially ironic for Buffett, who himself de-emphasizes IQ as the cause of his success.

For how real scores are produced and why they are not comparable across tests, see our methodology page and the historical IQ tests archive.

Frequently asked questions

Other modern figures