Warren Buffett's blind spot: Did Big Tech and the digital economy leave him behind? | Fortune

"Warren Buffett is to investing what Einstein was to physics, Edison was to invention, and Mozart was to music. There will never be another one like him, and you should pity anyone who says they aspire to be "the next Warren Buffett." Whenever I hear someone talk about "the next Warren Buffett," I think of Antonio Salieri, Mozart's inferior rival, played brilliantly by F. Murray Abraham in the movie Amadeus."

"The first lasted from shortly after he graduated from Columbia Business School in 1951 as Ben Graham's star pupil to the end of the dot.com bust. If you had invested in Buffett's partnership in the early days and then rolled your money into Berkshire Hathaway when that old textile company became his investing vehicle, over the next fifty years you would have nearly 500 times more money than if you'd invested in the S&P 500."

"You don't get a sense of how awesome, in the original sense of the word, that figure is until you translate the difference into actual dollars. A million dollars invested in the S&P from 1957 through 2007 would have been worth $166 million-but a million invested with Buffett would have been worth almost $81 billion. Fast forward another 18 years, and your $1 million with Buffett is now worth almost $ 428 billion."

Warren Buffett is compared to towering geniuses across fields, emphasizing his unique stature in investing. Buffett's career can be divided into two distinct periods, with the first spanning from his Columbia Business School years in 1951 through the end of the dot-com bust. Early investors who followed Buffett into Berkshire Hathaway saw returns nearly 500 times greater than the S&P 500 over fifty years. Converting relative performance into dollars shows staggering outcomes: $1 million in the S&P would have become $166 million, while $1 million with Buffett became nearly $81 billion, and then about $428 billion after another eighteen years. These first five decades account for more than 100% of his career outperformance.

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