Warren Buffett

For years his breakfast came through a McDonald’s drive-through, and the amount of money in his pocket was decided at home: his wife Astrid would leave the exact change in the car’s centre cup holder each morning before he left.

He got to choose according to the market. If stocks were up, it was the $3.17: a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. If the market had slipped he’d pass up the $3.17 and take the $2.95 sausage, egg and cheese. On the mornings he felt less prosperous still, $2.61 — two sausage patties, pressed together — as if rationing himself for the world’s bad news. Washed down, always, with a can of cherry-flavoured cola he’d been drinking by the fives and sixes since a boyhood soda fountain.

At his office desk hung a framed poster that read “GO TO Hell WEIGHT” — a candy company’s advert, and his own joke. His grandchildren filled mason jars with the daily Hershey’s bars he went through like cigarettes. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner at business meetings revolved around steak cooked well-done, chicken nuggets at airports, and ice cream with hot fudge most nights. No gym. No yoga mat. No green juice. His doctor, he claimed, was the one who told him to eat “like a six-year-old” — total calories low, joy high, exercise limited to long walks and pounding a keyboard reading 500 pages of newspapers and annual reports a day.

In 2023 his favourite soda company ran a promotion where he split a single custom Coke bottle: 50% cherry vanilla, 50% regular, 55 ounces of dessert, shared with the CEO. He’s said the only thing he regrets not eating is more candy before bed.

Nutritionists who see his chart would faint. Epidemiologists call him a fascinating outlier. He calls it “the compound interest of knowledge and the calories of a child.” He still works six days a week, still lives in the same grey stucco house he bought in 1958 for $31,500, and still plays online bridge four nights a week with a friend from the software business.

The man who ate like a kindergartner outlived the century of diet science that said he shouldn’t.

His name is Warren Buffett. He is 96 years old, still chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, still one of the three richest people on the planet — and his daily McDonald’s order, cherry Coke, and five candies remain the most studied “worst diet in history” ever to produce a nonagenarian billionaire.

Sources & citations

Part 10 of the series “What Billionaires Actually Eat.”