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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

The house he bought at 28 is 3500 square feet in a very very nice neighborhood and was worth $1.2 million a few years ago. It's humble by billionaire standards, not by average person standards. He never needed to size-up because of children, or size-down because of a bad economy, he was already set for both space and finances. Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.

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No, he's really humble, guys, trust me. He has only owned JUST ONE private jet in his life and has upgraded it only ONCE guys. He also currently owns the world's largest private jet operator NetJets [0] via Berkshire that he uses regulary to leverage its fleet now. I'm dying in the light of this humility.

0 - https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DLB-28383

For reference, this is the house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#/media/File:Dun...

That's a very misleading photo. An aerial view shows the multiple large buildings much better. https://presidenthouse.org/entry-18

That's a much better set of photos. It also confirms he was content with a two-car garage.

It also stands in contrast to the other celebrities and business leaders featured on that site. If they had a ranking ordered by size/value ascending, I wonder what number he would be. I still suspect it'd be near the top.

Very interesting page :-D

Buffet seems to be on top. Eric Schmidts condo is also worth a look.

If you compare that with Zuckerberg, Buffett is a saint without question.

Question: does it make you a saint if you don't spend money lavishly when you have it? Note: its only about not spending it, not about donating or otherwise using it for an ethical purpose.

Bezos was at least controversial to some when he was amazon CEO, now he started spending his fortunes and looks like a complete douche.

A touch of humbleness creates sympathy with people that cope with reality.

>Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.

That's the moral though. He didn't need it so he didn't do it. Whereas so many others with so much less do so much more.

> Let's not create a moralistic myth out of his lack of need.

Absolutely, but let's also not do the opposite. Being poor does not make one morally superior either.

You say "it's humble by billionaire standards" - I think it's relatively humble by ~$300k a year standards. The thing I love about this house is that I think it represents just about the maximum real utility one can get from a home.

He had 3 kids, and a 3500 sq ft house is, IMO, an extremely average size for any decently paid professional where I live with a family that size. It basically looks like something that had everything he needed, and anything beyond that that you so often see in rich people houses is just for show and bling.

the GP said "average person" though and 300k/year is waaaaaaay past average person.

It's insanely humble by billionaire standards. Any FAANG SWE over 30 or so in the United States can get that. Contrast with multiple compounds, entire islands, etc.

Buffet surely made lots of upgrades and has added plenty of material comforts.

But it is quite possible to be a kind of lazy where even 10-20x current wealth, people would live where they currently live. American neighborhoods are reasonable that way. It is just primary home and they would holiday/vacation wherever.

It is highly unusual for someone to stay put after their net worth increases tenfold. Normally, you would expect an individual to seek out more elite social circles and embrace a significantly more opulent lifestyle. Not having that isn’t a sign of laziness (one can be certain that someone like Warren Buffett lives exactly as he chooses) but rather a reflection of the rare ability to decide that what he has is already enough.

Not the daily FAANG SWE injection

> Any FAANG SWE

That is so few people.

So, so, few people.

Rough lookup says less than 150,000 people in the US, or 0.044% of the US population.

Still, slightly more than the 0.00026% who are billionaires.

They're not the only group that can afford it. They're just one that also happens to be much larger by multiple orders of magnitude than billionaires.

Zillow estimates that home as $1.5 million.

That’s not far off the current median home sales price in San Francisco and easily the median home price in many, many upper middle class neighborhoods across the country.

How many households in the US can afford a $1.5m home? Assuming they need $400k then we can see that that’s a 95th percentile household income in the US, which translates to about 6 million of the US’s total 135 million households.

Redfin has data showing about 8 million homes are worth $1 million plus, so 5 to 6 million households at the $1.5m mark seems about right as an estimate - or put another way - about 5% of US households could afford Warren Buffets home (but maybe not on a 95th percentile income in Omaha, Nebraska).

https://www.redfin.com/news/million-dollar-homes-increasing/

And yet "Majority of Americans Can No Longer Afford an Average House"

https://www.statista.com/chart/32925/annual-income-required-...

I think it's more that he didn't build a gaudy billionaire mansion, even though he easily could have.

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