Warren Buffett’s devout fans say he is inimitable. It has never stopped others from trying.
Buffett stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway’s chief executive officer in December, ending a decadeslong tenure noted for a remarkable investing record, rare dealmaking prowess and staunch loyalty to his hometown of Omaha, Neb., and its humble ways.
There is a new Berkshire CEO, Greg Abel, who succeeded Buffett in January. But for almost as long as there has been an oracle in Omaha, there has been a steady procession of would-be (or wannabe) copycats proclaimed by admirers, journalists and even themselves as the next Warren Buffett.
Buffett hopefuls have seldom passed their auditions, and in some cases, have failed miserably. “The Next Warren Buffett Curse,” or the superstition that those anointed with the title are doomed to fall short, might not be real. But looking at the list, believers in the so-called curse might have a point.
Fortune pondered whether Sam Bankman-Fried was “The Next Warren Buffett?” in a cover story mere months before the collapse of his crypto exchange FTX in 2022. He is currently serving a prison sentence after his conviction for fraud and conspiracy stemming from FTX’s failure. An appeals lawyer for Bankman-Fried didn’t reply to a request for comment.
And Weizhen Tang, who calls himself in a LinkedIn profile, was convicted in 2013 of defrauding customers in a $50 million Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to six years in jail and released in 2019. “My goal was never to simply mimic a title, but to apply a specific investment philosophy,” Tang said in an emailed statement. “Regarding the 2013 conviction, it is important to note that I have always maintained my innocence.”
Eddie Lampert, Businessweek’s Next Buffett contender back in 2004, transcended for a time the hedge-fund world that made him a billionaire by taking over Kmart in bankruptcy and later adding another troubled retailer, Sears, Roebuck, to his empire. But the combined company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Lampert didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Many others went on to find success, even if they haven’t (yet) matched Buffett’s record or emerged as a paragon of American business. Prem Watsa, CEO of Fairfax Financial, a Toronto company that owns insurers and other businesses run in a decentralized, Berkshire-like style, is known as the Warren Buffett of Canada. Watsa told The Wall Street Journal in 2015 that “there’s only one Buffett, and he’s in Omaha.”
Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the SPAC king, told Fortune in 2020 that he hoped to be “our generation’s Berkshire,” before high interest rates led to a bust in special-purpose acquisition companies.
The venture capitalist argued in a podcast earlier this year that Buffett’s glittering investing results were in part because of the “information asymmetry” that existed in the markets before federal regulations revamped disclosure rules in the early 2000s. He is now working on building software that incorporates artificial intelligence. Palihapitiya didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Buffett says that he has never sought insider information, instead consulting Moody’s books and other public reading materials. When he spoke with chief executives, he often only asked two questions: If they had to put all their money into buying shares of a competitor and hold that position for 10 years, which one would they pick and why? And which company would they choose to bet against?
“You don’t need inside information to make money in stocks,” Buffett said by phone from his office in Omaha. His advice for those aspiring to be like him: “It would be very helpful to know that they would live to be 95, because compounding really works its miracles in the last 10 years of your life.”
Being Buffett is no easy feat. The man himself has struggled to match his stock-picking record in recent years, amassing a record $373.1 billion in cash and equivalents by the end of his tenure. He has warned that Berkshire’s staggering size means that growth will have to slow. In 2024, Buffett said that there was “no possibility of eye-popping performance.”
A yearslong, dizzying artificial-intelligence rally that has left stocks trading at historically expensive levels has also made it difficult for Berkshire (and the Berkshire faithful) to find stocks at a bargain.
One contender is still vying to be the next Buffett: Bill Ackman. The hedge-fund manager has envisioned real-estate firm Howard Hughes as a modern-day Berkshire, with Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management taking a nearly 50% stake in the would-be conglomerate last year. Ackman was himself lauded as “Baby Buffett” on the cover of a 2015 issue of Forbes magazine, and has called the Berkshire chairman his “professor.”
“Warren Buffett had a 60-plus-year track record—my ambition is to best it,” Ackman told WSJ. Magazine last year. Ackman declined to comment for this article.
Ackman recently filed to take public his hedge fund, Pershing Square, in tandem with a new investment fund. The new U.S. fund would give Ackman access to more capital to emulate the Buffett strategy of longer-term bets than his past activist investments. Shares of Pershing Square’s largest fund, Pershing Square Holdings, have gained more than 170% since 2015.
For the record, Buffett has said that he pays little mind to his copycats. While his mentor Benjamin Graham was a great source of inspiration and investing knowledge, he started his own career as an investor simply because he enjoyed the work, said Buffett.
“I certainly can’t think of anything, at age 95, I’d rather be doing,” Buffett said in an interview.
Mohnish Pabrai runs Pabrai Investment Funds, modeled after Buffett Partnerships, the investing fund that Buffett ran before he took over Berkshire. Pabrai never worked for a Wall Street firm before starting his fund, and said that he learned everything he knows about investing from Berkshire, wisdom from Buffett and former Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, and reading Buffett’s biographies.
Despite calling himself a “shameless cloner” of Buffett, Pabrai said that he rolls his eyes at people who compare themselves to Buffett.
“There has not been another Warren Buffett, and for the next thousand years there will not be another Warren Buffett,” Pabrai said. “He is that unusual.”
Buffett has sometimes taken action to shake off piggybackers. He begrudgingly created Berkshire’s Class B shares in 1996 after Samuel Katz, a self-described civic entrepreneur, gushed to Buffett in a letter about his plans to create a unit investment trust containing Berkshire’s stock. Katz eventually gave up his plans, and Buffett later acknowledged that the launch of Class B shares turned out to be beneficial for the company.
A lawyer for Berkshire filed an application in 2006 to trademark Buffett’s name, in part a response to websites that sprang up using Buffett’s name to pitch their services. The lawyer later dropped the trademark push.
Some actual Buffetts have warded off comparisons to Berkshire’s chairman. Alex Rozek, the grandson of Buffett’s older sister, Doris, was chief executive of Boston Omaha, a public holding company, before departing in 2024. Rozek said that while he admires his famous granduncle, his firm never received help from Buffett or Berkshire. He also said he doesn’t believe people should be so quick to claim they are the next Warren Buffett.
“I’m pretty sure that everybody that goes to play or coach in the NFL would love to win eight Super Bowl rings, but I seriously doubt that any of them would want to start their career saying, ‘I’m going to be the next Bill Belichick,’ ” said Rozek, who now runs Mac Mountain, a company working to expand access to fiber broadband networks. “I’ve never seen the upside in doing that.”
Write to Krystal Hur at krystal.hur@wsj.com