What do you give the man who could buy anything for Christmas? The man who still lives in the same modest Omaha home he bought in 1958, prefers McDonald's over five-star dining, and has said time and again that more possessions don't make him any happier. That man is Warren Buffett — the billionaire behind Berkshire Hathaway and a master of investing in businesses that make money the old-fashioned way.
For Mary Buffett, his former daughter-in-law, this wasn't a theoretical question. When she married his son Peter in 1980, she suddenly found herself in a position no gift guide could solve. It was their first Christmas as newlyweds, and she needed a present for the Oracle of Omaha. Her solution? Numbers.
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"I realized, Warren is very rich. Therefore, he doesn't want anything," Mary told ThinkAdvisor in a 2019 interview. "I didn't know what to get him, so I put together our music company's balance sheet to show him that we were making money." She wasn't angling for funding. "No, I just wanted to show him, ‘Look, we're doing good.'"
Mary wasn't trying to impress him as an outsider. By the time she joined the family, she was already a seasoned executive who had worked at Columbia Records and run Hugh Hefner's music publishing companies. She and Peter co-owned a music label during their 13-year marriage. But nothing could quite prepare her for family dinners where conversation didn't stray far from stocks, earnings reports, and company valuations.
"That's all he talked about," she said. When they visited Omaha, Buffett could often be found on the phone with media moguls or publishers, chatting about investments. Even on holidays in Laguna Beach, California, Buffett would hold court with fellow titans of industry — discussing companies over turkey and pie like most people debate football.
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Back then, Mary didn't even know the full scale of Buffett's empire. "When I married him, the only thing I knew was that his father owned See's Candies," she told ThinkAdvisor. "So I was like, great — free candy! Never knowing that there was no free candy with Warren." That was Buffett in a nutshell: a man who owns a beloved chocolate company but doesn't hand out freebies.
Buffett's own gifting style was just as financially savvy. For years, he gave each family member $10,000 in crisp hundred-dollar bills. Then one Christmas, he pivoted. Instead of cash, he slipped stock certificates into envelopes — shares in a company recently purchased through a Coca-Cola trust. "He said to either cash them in or keep them," Mary told the outlet. She kept them. The value kept climbing. And every year after that, whenever he gifted stock — including shares of Wells Fargo — she would buy more, following his lead.
She paid close attention. After the divorce, Mary turned her Buffett immersion into a full-blown investing career. Her book, "Buffettology," co-authored with David Clark, became a bestseller. She later founded the Buffett Online School, consulted Fortune 500 companies, and taught finance at UCLA. Her most recent book, "7 Secrets to Investing Like Warren Buffett," builds on those early lessons: slow, steady, patient wins.
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Buffett looks for companies with predictable earnings that grow a little every year — the kind of businesses that don't crash after a good run. He avoids IPOs, avoids hype, and favors firms with minimal debt and long-term potential. When he bought Apple, it wasn't for its flash. It was because the company's earnings had increased every year for a decade, and its debt was manageable.
"The biggest part was watching his discipline and patience," she said. "He'd conduct research and understand the people who were running a company. All of that mattered so much to his success."
So when Mary gave him a balance sheet as a Christmas gift, it wasn't just clever — it was fitting. It spoke his language.
He's the man who owns See's Candy but doesn't hand out free chocolate. What he gives — and what Mary Buffett walked away with — are lessons that compound over time.
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