Warren Buffett’s first tax return showed $7 owed to the IRS. The then-paperboy and former Berkshire Hathaway CEO is now worth $143 billion

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. 

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. 

Warren Buffet's 1944 tax return by PBS NewsHour

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.

That’s 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. 

But Buffett has never begrudgingly paid his taxes. Instead, he has long argued he doesn’t pay enough taxes. Before Buffett took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire “did not pay a dime of income tax,” which he called “an embarrassment.

“That sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it’s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry,” Buffett wrote in the shareholder letter. 

Warren Buffett got his start as a paperboy

Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska, the only son of Howard and Leila Buffett (he has........

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