Warren Buffett is worth $142 billion today and was once the richest person in the world. Yet the Oracle of Omaha's financial story began with a teenage newspaper route that paid mere pennies.

Buffett filed his first federal tax return in 1944, at age 14, to report his earnings from delivering newspapers in Washington, D.C. He owed just $7, according to the two-page filing he shared with PBS NewsHour in 2017.

That year, Buffett earned $592.50, barely clearing the $500 gross-income threshold that then required a return. Adjusted for inflation using CPI data, those earnings would amount to $11,406.65 today, and the tax bill would come to $134.76.

The numbers are a far cry from the $26.8 billion Buffett said Berkshire Hathaway paid in 2024 taxes, according to his annual shareholder letter. At the time, it was the highest-ever payment made to the U.S. government.

Still, Buffett has never begrudged the IRS its due. If anything, he has long argued that he does not pay enough in taxes. Before he took control of Berkshire in 1965, the company, he said, “did not pay a dime of income tax”—a record 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.

A Paperboy's Start

Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930, in Omaha, the only son of Howard and Leila Buffett; he has two sisters. His father, a stockbroker who went on to serve four terms as a U.S. congressman, helped foster young Warren's fascination with business and markets. When Howard won election to Congress, the family relocated to Washington, D.C., where the teenage Warren found work delivering newspapers.

He carried both the morning and afternoon editions of the Washington Post and the now-defunct Washington Times-Herald along a route that ran past the homes of six senators and one Supreme Court justice, he told PBS. The route brought in $364 in 1944.

Buffett, who had begun investing at age 11, also collected $228 in interest and dividends that year from three shares of Cities Service Preferred stock he had bought. That brought his total 1944 income to $592.50. Under IRS rules at the time, any U.S. citizen—including a minor—who earned $500 or more was required to file a federal return, and he paid $7 in taxes.

The Deductions of a 14-Year-Old

Like any adult, Buffett made sure to write off his business expenses. He attached a handwritten note to his return documenting two costs: $10 for watch repair and $35 for miscellaneous bicycle expenses—items he used religiously on his morning route. By deducting them, he lowered his taxable income much as a seasoned entrepreneur or gig worker would, though he was only 14 at the time.

“I have paid federal income tax every year since 194,” Buffett said in a 2016 statement responding to claims about his tax history. “Though, being a slow starter, I owed only $7 in tax that year.”

From Paperboy to Billionaire

The newspaper route was just one of several early ventures. By age 15, Buffett had earned $2,000 from deliveries and spent $1,200 of it to purchase farmland in his home state of Nebraska, according to his 2008 biography, The Snowball, by Alice Schroeder. He reportedly also had a profit-sharing arrangement with the farmer.

He and a friend later bought a used pinball machine for $25, installed it in a barbershop, and within months had machines running in three locations across Washington, D.C. They sold the operation for $1,200.

“[I] built a small empire out of it,” Buffett told Bill Gates during a 2018 visit to an Omaha candy store not far from the site of Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting.

By the time he graduated from college, Buffett had accumulated $9,800 in savings. He went on to study under legendary value investor Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School, launched his own investment partnership in 1956, and took control of a struggling textile manufacturer, Berkshire Hathaway, in the mid-1960s—transforming it into one of the most valuable companies in the world. Buffett retired as Berkshire's CEO in late 2025, passing the role to his longtime deputy Greg Abel, but he is still worth $142 billion.

The Boy Who Paid $7 Grew Up to Say He Wasn't Paying Enough

Buffett's relationship with the IRS is, by his own account, a strange one. The 14-year-old who meticulously documented bicycle repairs became, decades later, one of the most prominent voices arguing that people like himself are undertaxed.

He has pointed out that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his longtime secretary, Debbie Bosanek.

“Debbie works just as hard as I do, and she pays twice the rate I pay,” he told ABC News in 2012. “I think that's outrageous.”

The gap traces to the structure of the tax code: Buffett's income comes overwhelmingly from investments, and investment income is taxed at lower rates than wages.

The contrast became so well-known that then-President Barack Obama proposed what became known as the “Buffett Rule,” which would have required individuals earning more than $1 million annually to pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. The bill was blocked by a Republican filibuster in 2012 and never became law.

Buffett continued to make the case publicly. At Berkshire Hathaway's 2024 annual shareholder meeting, he predicted that higher taxes were “quite likely,” citing fiscal policy, and criticized other companies for constantly scanning the tax code for the smallest loopholes.

“[The government] may decide that someday they don't want the fiscal deficit to be this large, because that has some important consequences,” Buffett said in 2024. “And they may not want to decrease spending a lot, and they may decide they'll take a larger percentage of what we earn, and we'll pay it.”

How Berkshire's tax bill evolves under Abel—and whether the higher taxes Buffett described materialize—will surface in the same place he disclosed the 2024 record: the annual shareholder letter.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on April 14, 2026.