At 14, Warren Buffett paid $7 in taxes. Today, his Berkshire empire pays $26.8 billion as he questions the rich’s tax burden

Warren Buffett’s first tax return was hardly the kind of document that suggested a future billionaire. He filed it in 1944, at age 14, after earning money delivering newspapers in Washington, D.C. His total income was $592.50. At the time, anyone earning $500 or more had to file a federal return.

Buffett owed $7. Most of his money came from his newspaper route. He earned $364 delivering the morning and afternoon editions of the Washington Post and the now defunct Washington Times-Herald. He also had $228 in interest and dividends from investments.

Buffett had already started buying stocks at 11. By 14, he was earning money from investments as well as from his work.

Warren Buffett’s $7 tax bill at 14 shows how far his money journey went

Buffett did not simply report what he earned and hand over whatever tax the government calculated. He also listed expenses.

His handwritten note included $10 for watch repairs and $35 for bicycle costs. Both were connected to his newspaper route. Those deductions reduced his taxable income.

It is a small detail from an old tax return, but it gives a clearer picture of Buffett at that age. He was already keeping track of what a business cost him, not just what it brought in.

Buffett later joked about the size of that first bill. In 2016, while responding to claims about his tax history, he said he had paid federal income tax every year since 1944 and described himself as a “slow starter” because he owed only $7 that first year.

The $592.50 he earned in 1944 was only one step in Buffett’s early business life.

By age 15, he had made about $2,000 from newspaper deliveries. He used $1,200 to buy farmland in Nebraska, according to Alice Schroeder’s 2008 biography The Snowball. He also reportedly arranged a profit sharing agreement with the farmer.

Then came a very different business.

Buffett and a friend bought a used pinball machine for $25 and put it in a barbershop. Within months, they had machines in three Washington locations. They eventually sold the operation for $1,200.

By the time Buffett finished college, he had accumulated $9,800 in savings. He later studied under Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School and started his own investment partnership in 1956.

His biggest financial chapter began when he took control of Berkshire Hathaway in the mid-1960s.

Berkshire went from paying no income tax to paying $26.8 billion

In 1944, Buffett personally owed $7.

In 2024, Berkshire Hathaway paid $26.8 billion in taxes, according to Buffett’s annual shareholder letter. The payment was the company’s largest-ever payment to the U.S. government at that point.

Buffett has also been unusually direct about Berkshire’s earlier tax history.

Before he took control of the company in 1965, he said Berkshire had not paid a dime of income tax. He called that an embarrassment and argued that such behavior was especially troubling for an established company.

Buffett’s argument about taxes became personal

Buffett once compared his own tax rate with that of his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek.

In a 2012 interview with ABC News, he said she worked as hard as he did but paid about twice the rate he paid.

That comparison became the basis for one of the most recognizable tax debates of the Obama years.

The proposed “Buffett Rule” would have required people earning more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. The measure was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate in 2012.

Buffett did not drop the argument after that political fight ended.

At Berkshire’s 2024 annual shareholder meeting, he said higher taxes were quite likely if the government eventually decided that the federal deficit had become too large.