Kevin O'Leary has a net worth of approximately $400 million. He owns homes in Florida, Massachusetts, and Toronto. He is one of the most recognizable faces on Shark Tank. Yet last week, he was standing in a Walmart (WMT +0.45%) aisle, comparing paper towel pack sizes to make sure he was getting the best deal.

"Inflation affects all of us," O'Leary said in a recent Instagram post filmed inside a Walmart store. "Saving dough is the name of the game. That means focusing on value and always looking for great deals. I know I am!"

The clip showed O'Leary holding a shopping list his wife had given him — batteries, butter, paper towels, laundry spray — and working to optimize each purchase.

On the paper towels: "I wanna save dough when it comes to paper towels. Check it out. Bounty — 12+ rolls is like 18 small rolls. I'm going plus," he said with a grin. The pack-size math he was doing is essentially unit-price comparison — checking the cost per roll or per sheet rather than the sticker price — a tactic consumer advocates have long recommended as a way to guard against "shrinkflation," where package sizes shrink while prices hold steady. He also held up a pair of $29 black jeans he said he regularly wears, adding that he is "always looking for a great deal, that's why [he was] in Walmart."

The inflation context behind the bargain hunting

O'Leary's point that inflation "affects all of us" is backed by the data. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' July Consumer Price Index report, overall consumer prices are up 3.4% over the past 12 months, with food prices rising 3.0% and energy up 14.7% over the same period.

Grocery and household staples have been particularly affected. The ConsumerAffairs Datasembly Shopping Cart Index found that a standard basket of 24 common grocery and household items — including paper products — cost 5.9% more in January 2026 than a year earlier, according to ConsumerAffairs. The pressure on staples comes after several years of elevated grocery inflation, which hit a multi-decade high of 11.8% year over year in 2022 — the fastest pace since 1979, per BLS data — leaving prices at a permanently higher base even as the annual rate of increase has cooled since.

For a household spending $1,000 a month on groceries and essentials, that is an extra $59 per month, or more than $700 per year — before accounting for energy costs.

He's not alone among the wealthy

Fortune reported that O'Leary's frugal streak is a pattern among some of the world's wealthiest people rather than an anomaly.

Warren Buffett — worth around $144 billion — still lives in the same Omaha home he bought in 1958 for $31,500. He famously let the stock market dictate his McDonald's breakfast order: $2.61 for two sausage patties when markets were down, and $3.17 for a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit on better days, according to HBO.

IKEA's late founder Ingvar Kamprad — who at one point had an estimated $58.7 billion — bought used clothes and drove an old Volvo. "I don't think I'm wearing anything that wasn't bought at a flea market," he said in a Swedish documentary.

And 31-year-old Scale AI co-founder Lucy Guo has embraced extreme frugality, wearing clothes from Shein and booking flights she would cancel just to eat for free at airport lounges.

The pattern also shows up in survey data. According to Northwestern Mutual, 79% of American millionaires describe their wealth as self-made, compared to just 12% who inherited it.

Ramsey Solutions' National Study of Millionaires — which surveyed more than 10,000 millionaires — also found that most built their wealth through disciplined saving and living below their means (94%), not through high salaries.

O'Leary has made this point explicitly in previous interviews, Fortune notes. "I hate wasting money," he reportedly told CNBC in 2021. "I just don't get why you would do that. It's so hard to make it in the first place."