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Warren Buffet: how a boy from Nebraska became the father of value investing

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Warren Buffet:

Buying his first stock at 11 years old, some believe that Warren Buffet was born to go into business. His father owned a small brokerage firm in which Warren would watch the brokers talk to investors, and how they went about their daily routine. He would frequent entrepreneurial pursuits as a teen, and enjoyed much success. He went on to study at University of Nebraska, graduating with a degree in Business. Buffet went onto securities analysis after reading a book “The Intelligent Investor” by Benjamin Graham, which he said changed his life. Buffet worked as an investment salesman, which he enjoyed thoroughly unless the stocks he suggested caused his clients to lose money.

Jackie WarnerTo counter having clients that would get annoyed at him for losing money, Buffet started a partnership, between friends and family, in which he would invest $100 and would grow his stake in the partnership through re-invested management fees.

Any partnership gains over 4% would be taken by Buffet and he would repay the quarter of losses incurred. Money could only been added or withdrawn on December 31st.

By 1959, Buffet had over a million dollars in assets and a 9.5% stake in several partnerships.

Following this Buffet invested directly into businesses, using his value investing techniques to find bargains on the stock market.

Buffet later went on to buy Berkshire Hathaway and use it as a holding company, as well as National Indemnity Company, creating a stable cash flow for future investments and acquisitions.

Warren Buffet is considered the ‘father of value investing’ and the ‘dean of Wall street’. This is due to his ability to make good investments which have made him a billionaire. He is considered one of the most successful investing stories of all time.

 

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Billionaires

Larry Page: How he founded one of the most widely used technologies on Earth

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Larry Pag

Larry Page is one of the world’s wealthiest people, and a co-founder of one of the most widely used technologies on Earth, Google. His net worth is an estimated $66 billion, and he uses his talents to benefit others.

Page studied at Stanford University when he met Sergey Brin, and the two developed a website called PageRank. PageRank gave a rank to websites based on the number of page links they had. Eventually, this would become Google (based on the mathematical number Googol), which would be based on the Stanford website, later spreading from there.

Google was launched in a friend’s garage in 1998, later moving to several buildings in California which they named ‘The Googleplex’.

Within its first 5 years, Google grew very fast, with over 18 million searches a day.

By 2000, Google had become the most popular internet search engine, and following this the company developed advertising, translation, academic searching and email.

By 2005, Android was developed, then 2006 Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Google would go on to develop and invest in many more innovative additions, such as the Google Glass.

With each investment and development, Page would look for the long term usability of the product, rather than the profitability.

Page would go on to start ‘Calico’, a Google based company that makes use of biotechnology to improve human health, as well as Google X, which provides free WiFi to Puerto Rico as of 2017.

 

Larry Page cofounded Google with Sergey Brin, and as a result, became a billionaire at 30 years old. His main priority is to search for and develop useful innovation, rather than those that are only profitable. He was able to take a website project and turn it into Google, one of the most widely used technologies in the world.

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Jeff Bezos’ rise to billionaire prominence

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Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos is a name that is globally recognised as the king of the Amazon empire and the richest man in the world. The billionaire has a variety of investments, ranging from real estate to TV. The CEO of Amazon amassed his wealth through his ‘everything store’ company, accounting for 44% of all digital spending. But how did Bezos rise from a Princeton graduate in a cozy finance job on Wall Street, to the richest man on the planet?

As Bezos was working at his finance job, he was intrigued by seeing that the Internet was growing at a rate of 2300% annually. He ended up selling books on his new platform Amazon, which within its first month, was selling books to every state in America and 45 different countries globally. He went on a campaign of raising capital for Amazon, raising a total of $9 million.

After going public, Amazon’s sales increased to over $17 billion in 2001.

In addition to this, Bezos was an early investor in Google, further increasing his wealth, with an investment of $250,000 being worth over $6 billion today.

Bezos has also invested in significant real estate including two multi-million dollar homes, as well as a 10,000 square foot apartment worth just under $10 million.

Having a strong interest in the technology sector, he has invested in Twitter and Business Insider, as well as acquiring the Washington Post, as well as investments in numerous other platforms.

There are some odd investments he has put his wealth into, including the mission to retrieve F-1 engines, used to power Apollo 11, from the ocean floor. Another odd investment is building a clock into the side of the Sierra Diablo mountain range that will tick for 10,000 years.

Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet through his various investments and his creation of global business giant, Amazon.

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Elon Musk: How he came to develop rockets and electric cars

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Elon Musk

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve definitely heard of or seen a Tesla car, and more than likely you’ve heard of SpaceX launching a self-landing rocket into space. If you have heard of these, then you definitely have heard of Elon Musk, the brains behind it all, and so much more. Musk was born in South Africa and attended high school, then 5 months of university there. He moved to Canada to attend the Queen’s University in order to avoid mandatory South African military service, and because it would make it easier to obtain American citizenship. By 1992, Musk had left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially, he planned to go into a PhD program at Stanford University in Physics, however, the Internet Boom had started to occur and Musk decided to form his company Zip2 with his brother in order to make the most of the opportunities presented to him.

Zip2 acted as an online city guide, and provided content for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Zip2 was acquired by Compaq for $307 million, of which Musk received $22 million for his stake in the company.

Musk went on to found X.com, acting as a financial services/payments company, which eventually lead to the creation of PayPal.

Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was bought out for $1.5 billion in stock.

From here on, we know Musk founded SpaceX, intending to build spacecraft in order to travel through space commercially. SpaceX made history when their spacecraft successfully launched into space.

Musk also formed Tesla, a car brand that is well known, in which one of the cars is able to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.7 seconds.

This is how Elon Musk came to be the inventor and mogul as we know him today.

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