THE ORACLE
"Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget Rule No. 1." — Warren Buffett
ONE
THE SNOWBALL
EXT. OMAHA, NEBRASKA — 1936 — DAY
Aerial shot. The flat, endless plains of middle America stretch to the horizon. We drift down over modest clapboard houses, church steeples, grain elevators. A title card fades in:
Omaha, Nebraska. 1936. Population: 214,000. Average annual income: $1,524.
We find a SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY standing on a residential sidewalk with a small red wagon. In the wagon: six-packs of Coca-Cola he bought at his grandfather’s grocery store for twenty-five cents. He is selling individual bottles to neighbors for a nickel each.
This is YOUNG WARREN BUFFETT. Skinny, enormous ears, already doing the math.
YOUNG WARREN
(to a neighbor, earnestly)
That’s a five-cent profit per six-pack, sir. But if you buy two bottles right now, I can guarantee supply continuity through the weekend.
The NEIGHBOR stares at this strange child. Buys two bottles anyway.
CUT TO:
INT. BUFFETT FAMILY HOME — DINING ROOM — NIGHT
HOWARD BUFFETT SR. sits at the head of the table. He is upright, principled, deeply Republican in the old sense — a man who believes in honest work and honest government. Warren’s mother, LEILA, serves pot roast in tense silence. She is mercurial, sharp-tongued, prone to rages that leave the children walking on eggshells.
HOWARD SR.
Warren, your teacher called again. She says you were calculating the number of seconds in her lifetime instead of doing your reading.
YOUNG WARREN
She’s lived approximately one billion, two hundred million seconds, Dad. Give or take. I told her. She didn’t seem impressed.
LEILA
(tight-lipped)
You will do your reading, Warren. You will not embarrass this family.
Warren shrinks. He pushes peas around his plate. Under the table, his fingers tap — counting something only he can see.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
My mother could strip the paint off a wall with her voice. I learned early that the safest place in the world was inside a number. Numbers don’t yell at you.
CUT TO:
EXT. OMAHA STREETS — PAPER ROUTE — DAWN — 1944
WARREN, now thirteen, rides a bicycle through pre-dawn Omaha, hurling newspapers onto porches with mechanical precision. A canvas bag over his shoulder holds hundreds of copies of the Washington Post and the Omaha World-Herald. He delivers five hundred papers a day across multiple routes.
By age 14, Warren Buffett had saved $1,200 from his paper routes — equivalent to roughly $20,000 today.
Warren stops at a drugstore, pulls a small ledger from his back pocket, and records his earnings to the penny. He also records the purchase of his first pinball machine, placed in a local barbershop.
WARREN
(to his friend DANLY, riding beside him)
The pinball machine cost twenty-five dollars. It made four dollars the first day. Don, do you understand what that means? We’ll have the money back in a week. Then it’s pure profit. Then we buy another one.
DANLY
What if it breaks?
WARREN
Then we fix it. What do barbers know about pinball machines? We tell them we’re from the Nebraska Pinball Company. They don’t ask questions.
Warren grins. It’s the grin of a boy who has found the cheat code to the universe: compound interest.
CUT TO:
INT. HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA — STOCK BROKERAGE — 1942
YOUNG WARREN, age eleven, stands on his toes to see over the counter at a brokerage office. His father Howard works here. A TICKER MACHINE chatters in the corner, spitting out paper tape.
YOUNG WARREN
I’d like to buy three shares of Cities Service Preferred, please. At thirty-eight and a quarter.
The BROKER looks down at this child, then at Howard, who nods.
The stock drops to twenty-seven. Warren watches the board, sick with anxiety. His sister DORIS, who went in with him, asks about it every single day. When it recovers to forty, Warren sells.
YOUNG WARREN
(watching the ticker, devastated)
It went to two hundred.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
Three lessons before I was twelve. One: don’t watch the stock every minute. Two: don’t sell just because you’re ahead. Three: don’t invest other people’s money if you can’t handle them asking about it.
CUT TO:
INT. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY — LECTURE HALL — 1950
BENJAMIN GRAHAM stands at the lectern. He is small, precise, professorial. In the front row, WARREN BUFFETT (now played by Paul Dano at twenty) sits with the intensity of a disciple before a prophet. The other students are bored. Warren is vibrating.
GRAHAM
The stock market is a voting machine in the short run. A weighing machine in the long run. Your job is not to vote. Your job is to weigh.
Warren scribbles furiously. He has already read Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor” at age nineteen and later called it “the best book on investing ever written.”
WARREN
(after class, approaching Graham)
Professor Graham, I want to work for you. For free. I’ll pay you to let me work for you.
GRAHAM
(amused)
Mr. Buffett, you overestimate the value of enthusiasm and underestimate the value of my office space.
Graham turns him down. Warren goes back to Omaha. But Graham’s framework — buy a dollar for fifty cents — is now welded into his brain.
Warren Buffett received the only A+ Benjamin Graham ever gave in twenty-two years of teaching at Columbia.
CUT TO:
INT. THOMPSON FAMILY HOME — LIVING ROOM — OMAHA — 1951
A small gathering. Warren, twenty-one, awkward, terrified of women, sees SUSIE THOMPSON across the room. She is radiant, musical, effortlessly social — everything he is not. She is dating Warren’s roommate’s sister’s friend. Warren doesn’t care.
WARREN
(to Susie, his opening line)
I’ve been told you like music. I have a ukulele.
SUSIE
(laughing)
That’s your pitch?
WARREN
I’m also going to be very, very rich.
SUSIE
Is that supposed to help?
WARREN
Historically, yes.
She laughs. He plays the ukulele badly but with sincerity. She sees something in him that no one else does: the loneliness underneath the numbers.
CUT TO:
INT. BUFFETT HOME — SPARE BEDROOM / OFFICE — OMAHA — 1956
Warren sits at a desk piled with annual reports. He is running the Buffett Partnership out of his house. Seven partners. $105,000 in capital. Susie, now his wife, brings him a Cherry Coke and a hamburger. Their first child, also named Susie, toddles nearby.
WARREN
(not looking up from a report)
Thank you, Susie. I found something. Sanborn Map Company. They make fire insurance maps. The stock is trading at forty-five, but the investment portfolio alone is worth sixty-five per share. The entire map business — which has been profitable for decades — comes for free.
SUSIE
Warren. Your daughter just said her first word.
WARREN
(still reading)
That’s wonderful. What was it?
SUSIE
“Dada.”
A beat. Warren finally looks up. Something crosses his face — guilt, joy, and the quiet terror of a man who knows he loves numbers more easily than people.
WARREN
(softly)
Tell her I said it back.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
Susie was the interpreter between me and the world. Without her, I was just a machine that happened to eat hamburgers.
DISSOLVE TO:
TWO
THE BERKSHIRE BET
EXT. NEW BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS — BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY TEXTILE MILL — 1965
A sprawling, aging textile factory. Smokestacks. Workers in overalls stream through iron gates. The American textile industry is dying, crushed by cheap imports. Warren Buffett stands outside the gates, hands in his pockets, looking at the building with the expression of a man who has just made either a brilliant move or a terrible mistake.
New Bedford, Massachusetts. 1965. Warren Buffett, age 35, takes control of Berkshire Hathaway — a failing textile mill. He calls it “the worst trade I ever made.”
WARREN
(to his partner, looking at the mill)
I bought this because the president lied to me about the tender offer price. I got angry. And I bought an entire dying textile company out of spite. Charlie, that anger cost me about two hundred billion dollars.
This is a flash-forward. We see older Warren and CHARLIE MUNGER walking the mill decades later, the building now abandoned.
CHARLIE
The best thing about the textile business was that it taught you everything you needed to know about bad businesses.
WARREN
That’s like saying the best thing about hitting yourself with a hammer is the educational value.
CUT TO:
INT. OMAHA STEAK HOUSE — NIGHT — 1959
Warren sits across from CHARLIE MUNGER for the first time. Charlie is a lawyer from Los Angeles, intense, well-read, sarcastic. A mutual friend arranged the dinner. Within five minutes, both men are leaning forward, finishing each other’s sentences.
CHARLIE
Graham’s cigar-butt approach — buying terrible companies because they’re cheap — works until it doesn’t. You want to find a wonderful business at a fair price. Not a fair business at a wonderful price.
WARREN
You’re telling me to pay more.
CHARLIE
I’m telling you to think more. A great business compounds. A cheap, lousy business gives you one last puff and then it goes out.
Warren sits back. This is a philosophical earthquake. Everything Graham taught him was about buying cheaply. Charlie is saying: buy quality.
WARREN
(slowly)
See’s Candies.
CHARLIE
What about it?
WARREN
It’s a wonderful business. Great brand. Pricing power. Loyal customers. But Ben Graham would say it’s too expensive.
CHARLIE
Then Ben Graham would be wrong.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
Charlie pushed me from buying cheap junk to buying wonderful businesses. It was the most important evolution of my life. He was the architect. I was just the contractor.
CUT TO:
INT. SEE’S CANDIES FACTORY — LOS ANGELES — 1972
Warren and Charlie walk through the See’s Candies factory. Women in white aprons dip chocolates by hand. The smell is extraordinary. Warren eats a free sample. Then another. Then four more.
WARREN
We paid twenty-five million. They earn four million a year after tax. Charlie, people will pay more for these chocolates every single year. Valentine’s Day alone —
CHARLIE
A man who gives his wife cheap chocolates on Valentine’s Day is not long for that marriage.
WARREN
(eating another chocolate)
Pricing power. It’s the single most important factor in business. If you can raise prices without losing customers, you have a great business. If you have to hold a prayer meeting before raising prices, you have a terrible business.
Berkshire paid $25 million for See’s Candies in 1972. Over the next five decades, See’s generated more than $2 billion in pre-tax earnings.
CUT TO:
INT. GEICO HEADQUARTERS — WASHINGTON, D.C. — 1976
GEICO is on the brink of bankruptcy. The stock has fallen from sixty-one dollars to two. Regulators are circling. Warren calls JACK BYRNE, GEICO’s new CEO.
WARREN
(on the phone)
Jack, I want to buy a significant position. I think you can save this company.
BYRNE
(on the other end, exhausted)
Warren, we’re losing a million dollars a month. Our regulators want to shut us down. Why on earth would you buy?
WARREN
Because you have the low-cost model. Direct to consumer. No agents. Every other insurance company carries the cost of agents. You don’t. That advantage doesn’t go away because you’re losing money. The moat is still there. You just need someone to stop the bleeding.
Warren begins buying. Millions of dollars. Then tens of millions. Other investors think he’s lost his mind.
Buffett’s GEICO investment ultimately returned more than 5,000%. Berkshire eventually acquired the entire company in 1996 for $2.3 billion.
CUT TO:
INT. BUFFETT HOME — KITCHEN — OMAHA — 1977
Susie stands at the kitchen counter, her suitcases by the door. Warren sits at the table, a half-eaten hamburger in front of him, looking like a man who has just been told the sun won’t rise tomorrow.
SUSIE
I’m not leaving you, Warren. I’m leaving this house. I need to sing. I need to live. I’ve spent twenty-five years being your emotional translator, and I can’t do it anymore.
WARREN
(barely audible)
I don’t understand.
SUSIE
I know. That’s exactly the problem.
Susie moves to San Francisco to pursue her singing career. She sends Astrid Menks — a young Latvian waitress from a local restaurant — to look after Warren. It is the most extraordinary domestic arrangement in the history of American wealth: the wife who left, the woman she sent as a replacement, and the billionaire who ate the same hamburger every day and never changed the channel from the business news.
WARREN
(alone, to the empty room)
I can analyze any company on earth. I cannot analyze this.
DISSOLVE TO:
THREE
THE ORACLE RISES
INT. BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY OFFICE — KIEWIT PLAZA — 1988
Warren’s office is famously modest. No computer. No Bloomberg terminal. No calculator. A desk, a chair, some annual reports, and a phone. Warren picks up the phone.
WARREN
(into the phone)
Don, I want to buy Coca-Cola stock. A lot of it.
DON KEOUGH
(on the other end, Coca-Cola president)
How much is “a lot,” Warren?
WARREN
About a billion dollars’ worth.
Silence on the line.
WARREN
(continuing, calmly)
I’ve been drinking five Cokes a day since I was a child. I should have bought the stock then. I’m correcting a fifty-year error.
Buffett invested $1.3 billion in Coca-Cola in 1988-89. By 2024, Berkshire’s Coca-Cola stake was worth over $25 billion, generating $776 million per year in dividends alone — more than half the original investment, every single year.
CUT TO:
INT. SALOMON BROTHERS — TRADING FLOOR — NEW YORK — 1991
Chaos. The Treasury bond scandal has broken. Salomon Brothers traders illegally cornered the government bond market. The firm faces criminal charges. Warren, who invested $700 million in Salomon, is asked to become interim chairman. He stands before Congress.
INT. U.S. CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ROOM — DAY
Warren faces a panel of hostile senators. Camera flashes. The room is packed. He leans into the microphone and delivers the line that will define corporate accountability for a generation:
WARREN
Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm, and I will be ruthless.
The room goes quiet. He means it. He fires the offending traders, cooperates fully with regulators, and saves the firm from destruction. His reputation, already substantial, becomes bulletproof.
CUT TO:
INT. CHA-CHA BALLROOM — OMAHA — BERKSHIRE ANNUAL MEETING — 1995
What started as a small gathering has become the largest annual shareholder meeting in the world. Thousands of people fill the arena. They wear Berkshire Hathaway T-shirts. They eat See’s Candies. They drink Cherry Coke. Warren and Charlie sit at a folding table on stage.
“Woodstock for Capitalists” — the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting attracts over 40,000 shareholders to Omaha each year.
SHAREHOLDER
(from the audience)
Warren, what’s your secret to investing?
WARREN
Read five hundred pages a day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.
CHARLIE
(deadpan)
I have nothing to add.
The crowd roars with laughter. This exchange — Warren’s folksy wisdom followed by Charlie’s dry one-liner — becomes the signature rhythm of every meeting for the next three decades.
CUT TO:
INT. BERKSHIRE OFFICE — KIEWIT PLAZA — 1999
The dot-com bubble is at its peak. CNBC plays on a small television in the corner. Every technology stock is soaring. Berkshire Hathaway’s stock is falling. Barron’s has published a cover story: “WHAT’S WRONG, WARREN?”
Warren sits at his desk, reading an annual report from a brick manufacturer.
REPORTER
(on phone)
Warren, your shareholders are losing faith. Tech stocks are up three hundred percent. You haven’t bought a single one. Are you out of touch?
WARREN
(calm, almost amused)
I don’t understand technology businesses. I don’t invest in things I don’t understand. If that makes me out of touch, I’ll live with it.
REPORTER
But the world has changed. The old rules don’t apply.
WARREN
The four most dangerous words in investing: “This time is different.”
He hangs up. Goes back to his brick company annual report. The dot-com bubble bursts nine months later. Berkshire Hathaway soars.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. It sounds simple. It’s almost impossible.
CUT TO:
INT. WARREN’S HOME — LIVING ROOM — NIGHT — 2003
Warren and ASTRID sit together on the couch. She knits. He reads. They have been together for twenty-five years. The arrangement with Susie has endured, improbably, with all three signing Christmas cards “Warren, Susie, and Astrid.”
ASTRID
(without looking up from her knitting)
You’re worried about Susie.
WARREN
She didn’t sound right on the phone.
ASTRID
Then call her again.
WARREN
I don’t want to bother her.
ASTRID
(looking at him now)
Warren. She’s your wife. You can’t bother your own wife.
Warren picks up the phone. His hand trembles slightly. For a man who can deploy ten billion dollars without flinching, a personal phone call is the hardest thing in the world.
DISSOLVE TO:
FOUR
THE GIVING PLEDGE
INT. HOSPITAL — SAN FRANCISCO — JULY 2004
Susie Buffett lies in a hospital bed. Oral cancer. She is seventy-two. Warren sits beside her, holding her hand with the clumsy tenderness of a man who never learned how to hold anything that wasn’t a balance sheet. Their children — SUSIE JR., HOWARD, and PETER — stand nearby.
SUSIE
(weakly, but with her old warmth)
Warren. Promise me you’ll give it away. All of it. Don’t let the money sit there. It can do so much good.
WARREN
(tears streaming, voice breaking)
I promise, Suse.
SUSIE
And call the kids more.
WARREN
I’ll — I’ll try.
SUSIE
(a faint smile)
Don’t try. Do it. Even you can learn a new trick.
She passes on July 29, 2004. Warren is inconsolable. He sits alone in his Omaha house, eating McDonald’s, unable to read annual reports for the first time in his life.
Two years after Susie’s death, Warren married Astrid Menks in a quiet ceremony. Susie Jr. attended and gave her blessing.
CUT TO:
INT. BERKSHIRE OFFICE — SEPTEMBER 2008 — FINANCIAL CRISIS
Lehman Brothers has collapsed. AIG is failing. The global financial system is in free fall. Warren’s phone rings. It is HANK PAULSON, the Treasury Secretary.
PAULSON
(on phone, urgent)
Warren, Goldman Sachs needs capital. The market is in a death spiral. If Goldman goes, everything goes.
WARREN
(eating a hamburger at his desk)
What terms?
PAULSON
Whatever you want. Just move fast.
Warren negotiates for ten minutes. He invests five billion dollars in Goldman Sachs preferred stock at a ten percent dividend with warrants. It takes one phone call. No board meeting. No committee. No lawyers. One man, one phone, five billion dollars.
WARREN
(to Charlie, afterward)
When people are running from a burning building, you don’t negotiate the price of the fire hose.
CHARLIE
You just charged them ten percent for the hose.
WARREN
(a small smile)
It’s a very good hose.
Berkshire’s Goldman Sachs investment earned approximately $3.7 billion in profit. During the crisis, Buffett also invested in General Electric, Dow Chemical, Swiss Re, and Bank of America.
CUT TO:
INT. BILL GATES’ HOME — MEDINA, WASHINGTON — 2010
Warren and BILL GATES sit in Gates’ living room. Between them, a sheet of paper: the Giving Pledge. A commitment by the world’s wealthiest to give away the majority of their fortunes.
GATES
Forty families have signed so far. We’re aiming for a hundred.
WARREN
You know what the hardest part is? It’s not the money. Money’s easy to give away. The hard part is convincing billionaires that their children will survive without inheriting everything.
GATES
What did you tell your kids?
WARREN
I told them I’m leaving them enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.
Warren Buffett pledged to give away 99% of his wealth. As of 2024, he has donated over $55 billion, primarily to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and his children’s foundations.
CUT TO:
EXT. WARREN’S HOME — FARNAM STREET — OMAHA — GOLDEN HOUR
The same modest house Warren bought in 1958 for $31,500. Five bedrooms, gray stucco, unremarkable in every way. He still lives here. He drives himself to work. He eats at the same restaurants. His net worth exceeds $130 billion.
Warren (now played by Tom Hanks) sits on the front porch with a Cherry Coke. The sun sets over Omaha. Astrid brings him a plate of cookies. He takes one, dunks it in the Coke.
WARREN
(to no one in particular)
Somebody once asked me what I want on my tombstone. I said: “He was a good teacher.”
He looks at the street. Children ride bicycles past his house, the same way he once rode his bicycle on a paper route seventy years ago.
WARREN
(quietly)
I won the ovarian lottery. Born in America. Born white. Born male. Born in 1930, just in time for the greatest bull market in human history. The least I can do is give it back.
WARREN (V.O.) (breaking the fourth wall)
I spent my whole life compounding money. The thing nobody tells you is that the real compounding — the kind that matters — is love. And I was a terrible investor in that. Susie knew it. Charlie knew it. I’m ninety-three years old, and I’m still learning.
CUT TO:
INT. BERKSHIRE ANNUAL MEETING — CHI HEALTH CENTER — OMAHA — 2024
Forty thousand people. The arena is full. But for the first time in sixty years, Charlie Munger’s chair is empty. Charlie died on November 28, 2023, thirty-three days before his hundredth birthday.
Warren sits alone at the table. He looks at the empty chair. The crowd is silent. Then Warren speaks.
WARREN
(voice cracking slightly)
Charlie was always right. Even when I thought he was wrong, he was right. He just had to wait for me to figure it out. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss being wrong and having him explain why.
He pauses. Drinks his Cherry Coke. Adjusts his glasses.
WARREN
Someone asked Charlie once what he wanted people to say about him after he died. He said, “That guy, he really lived a long time.”
The crowd laughs through tears. Warren nods. The meeting continues. The machine he built will outlast him, and he knows it.
SMASH CUT TO:
EXT. OMAHA — FARNAM STREET — DAWN
The same flat, modest, beautiful Omaha we opened on. Same clapboard houses. Same grain elevators on the horizon. A SMALL BOY pulls a red wagon down the sidewalk. In the wagon: bottles of something he’s going to sell.
The camera pulls up and up, over the rooftops, over the city, over the plains, until Omaha is a small cluster of lights in the vast dark center of America.
Warren Buffett turned $114,000 into over $900 billion in assets under management. He lives in the same house he bought in 1958. He still drives himself to McDonald’s every morning. He still reads six hundred pages a day.
THE END
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” — Warren Buffett