![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-540179188-1-e1776174758145.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Warren Buffett, who is worth $143 billion today and was once the richest man in the world, was once making mere pennies as a teenage paper boy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Oracle of Omaha filed his very first tax return in 1944 when he was just 14 years old for his earnings delivering newspapers in Washington, D.C. He owed just $7 in federal taxes, according to the two-page tax filing he shared with PBS NewsHour in 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Warren Buffet’s 1944 tax return by PBS NewsHour <\/p>\n
That year, he earned $592.50, just barely over the requirement at the time to file a return for gross income of $500 or more. Today, his earnings would be worth $11,244.32, and his taxes would equate to $132.84, according to CPI Inflation data.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a far cry from the $26.8 billion Buffett said his company Berkshire Hathaway paid in 2024 taxes, according to his annual shareholder letter. That was the highest-ever payment made to the U.S. government at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Buffett has never begrudgingly paid his taxes. Instead, he has long argued he doesn\u2019t pay enough taxes. Before Buffett took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire \u201cdid not pay a dime of income tax,\u201d which he called \u201can embarrassment.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it\u2019s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry,\u201d Buffett wrote in the shareholder letter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Warren Buffett got his start as a paperboy<\/p>\n
Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska, the only son of Howard and Leila Buffett (he has two sisters). His father, Howard, was a stockbroker and eventual four-term U.S. Congressman, and served as an early influence on Warren\u2019s fascination with business and markets. When Howard was elected to Congress, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., where a teenage Warren found work delivering newspapers.<\/p>\n
Buffett delivered both morning and afternoon editions of The Washington Post and the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald, working a route that ran past the homes of six senators and one Supreme Court justice, he told PBS.<\/p>\n
In 1944, he earned $364 from that route. Buffett, who had started investing at the ripe age of 11, also earned $228 in interest and dividends that year, having bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred stock. That brought his total income that year to $592.50.<\/p>\n
Under IRS rules at the time, any U.S. citizen, including a minor, who earned $500 or more was required to file a federal return, and he paid just $7 in taxes.<\/p>\n
The tax deductions of a 14-year-old Buffett<\/p>\n
Just as any adult would do, Buffett made sure to write off his business expenses that year on his tax return. He attached a handwritten note documenting two business expenses: $10 for watch repair and $35 for miscellaneous bicycle costs. Buffett used both of these religiously on his morning paper route.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By deducting those costs, he lowered his taxable income like any seasoned entrepreneur or gig worker would, but he was only 14 years old at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have paid federal income tax every year since 1944,\u201d Buffett said in a 2016 statement responding to claims about his tax history. \u201cThough, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year.\u201d<\/p>\n
From paperboy to billionaire<\/p>\n
The newspaper route was just one of several early ventures for Buffett.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the time he was 15, he had earned $2,000 from deliveries and spent $1,200 of it to purchase farmland in his home state of Nebraska,\u00a0according to\u00a0his 2008 biography,\u00a0The Snowball,\u00a0by\u00a0Alice Schroeder. Buffett also reportedly had a profit-sharing agreement with the farmer.<\/p>\n
He and a friend later bought a used pinball machine for $25, placed it in a barbershop, and within months had machines running in three locations across Washington, D.C. They sold the operation for $1,200.<\/p>\n
\u201c[I] built a small empire out of it,\u201d he told Bill Gates during a visit to an Omaha candy store during the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting.<\/p>\n
By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had accumulated $9,800 in savings. He went on to study under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School, launched his own investment partnership in 1956, and took control of a struggling textile manufacturer, Berkshire Hathaway, in the mid-1960s\u2014transforming it into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Buffett retired as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway in late 2025, but he\u2019s still worth $143 billion.<\/p>\n
The boy who paid $7 grew up to say he wasn\u2019t paying enough<\/p>\n
The arc of Buffett\u2019s relationship with the IRS is, by his own account, a strange one. The man who meticulously documented his bicycle repairs at 14 became, decades later, one of the most prominent voices arguing that people like him are undertaxed.<\/p>\n
He once pointed out that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cDebbie works just as hard as I do and she pays twice the rate I pay,\u201d he told ABC News in 2012. \u201cI think that\u2019s outrageous.\u201d<\/p>\n
The contrast became so well-known that then-President Barack Obama proposed what became known as the \u201cBuffett Rule,\u201d which would have required individuals earning more than $1 million annually to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. The bill was blocked by a Republican filibuster in 2012.<\/p>\n
Buffett continued to make the case publicly. At Berkshire Hathaway\u2019s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, he predicted that higher taxes were \u201cquite likely,\u201d citing fiscal policy, and criticized other companies for constantly scrutinizing the tax code for the smallest loopholes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey may decide that someday they don\u2019t want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences,\u201d Buffett said in 2024. \u201cAnd they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they\u2019ll take a larger percentage of what we earn, and we\u2019ll pay it.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Warren #Buffetts #tax #return #showed #owed #IRS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Warren Buffett, who is worth $143 billion today and was once the richest man in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[2008,4425,168,1439,4694,8407,780,5758,3526,227,405,2007,2002],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}