Is Warren Buffet an Aspie?

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My “professional career” revolved around capital markets and to this day, I remain fascinated by financial markets. I used the inverted commas because it really was not a career as I was fired from every job that I every got.

I have read with a great deal of interest the life of Warren Buffet. He is widely acknowledged to be an investment genius who recently made headlines by donating the bulk of this immense wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffet and Gates are known to be great friends and Bill Gates is commonly thought to be an Aspie. As part of the publicity surrounding the donation, Charlie Rose did a three part series of Warren Buffet. As I watched the Warren Buffet interviews, the thought that Warren Buffet might be an Aspie crept into my mind.

For instance, Buffet describes himself as being wired differently from other people. Now that is a description that practically all Aspies will agree to. When Bill Gates was asked to describe the moment when he connected with Buffet, he mentions something quite curious. He was at a lunch with Buffet who mentioned that the key to his success was his ability to focus. Buffet says that he is simply undistracted by the things that other very intelligent people are distracted by. Indeed, when you examine Warren Buffet’s description of his daily routine, you will find that he spends the bulk of his time doing just one thing – reading financial reports. Most normal people would find it excruciatingly boring to read even one financial report. Warren Buffet made it his life to do this.

In his relations with the world, Buffet is equally strange. His wife left him, although they never divorced, to live in San Francisco. In the only interview she gave before she died, she describes Warren Buffet as capable of being married to her even though she was not there. She talks of a man who was so dependent on others that he probably could not find the light switch in the house. His relationship with his children appears to be equally tense. His younger son talks of how difficult it is to connect emotionally with the man.

I have written this partly because I want to believe that someone like me could possess the prerequisites to succeed as an investor but also to look at how some one like Buffet, who might potentially be an Aspie, has succeeded so wildly. Warren Buffet is quite possibly the only big wig in the financial world that is both loved and respected by the public. That is a very odd outcome for a man who secludes himself for most part of the time in Omaha Nebraska. I argue that his seclusion is actually necessary for him to succeed. He did very poorly when required to function as part of a team as his stint as chairman of Solomon Brothers shows. He engendered so much ill will that he quite literally had to step down.

Financial success and independence need not be the result of slogging like a pig in a chicken coop where all the other chickens are constantly trying to peck your eyes out. At least in the case of Warren Buffet, it is possible to harness one’s strengths to achieve outsized returns.

is there a buffet autobiography available and do you know its name..i would be curous.

There are lots of Warren Buffet biographies available. The one that has the informal endorsement of the man himself is called "Of Permanent Value" I think. You might also want to check out the Charlie Rose interview on Google.

Economics Nobel Laureate, Prof. Vernon L. Smith, has Asperger’s Syndrome and was interviewed on MSNBC last year. He talks about being highly focused, “I can switch out and go into a concentrated mode and the world is completely shut out”.

Interestingly, some of his research concerns empathy in bargaining and other financial transactions. I know some Aspies who study empathy in order to understand other people better. One guy is writing a Novel, in doing so he has to understand the minds and emotions of his characters. Another guy is an actor, again acting often involves putting yourself in another persons position and is another way of gaining empathic skill.

It seems that, in studying empathy and the psychology of people, Prof. Smith was not just understanding economics better (for which he won a Nobel Prize) but he understood people better too. Thus, it could be said, that the effort Prof. Smith expended in trying to understand other people led to a Nobel Prize.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7030731/

Uh, isn't Warren Buffet Jimmy Buffett's father?

Warren talks about doing what you love. For instance I love philosophy and history, and enjoy debating the topics. I also love Economics but I find math to be evil. I'm actually very good at it. I've been skipping math classes all my life, even in college. If you love investing then do that. When I'm thinking about History or Philosophy I literally go into my own world and I lose the ability to sense the world around me. It's very beneficial for my kind of interest, but it also makes me feel like I'm going insane. My closes friends can't keep up with the points and connections I'm making...if they even exist. I probably won't be a philosopher or a historian...a doctor maybe??? I'm still deciding. But he's right, we are wired differently. The world we live in was selfishly made for people like ourselves who actually enjoy reading crap others would find useless. And probably in all honesty is useless, but our skills at persuasion have convinced people to live life this way...odd. Honestly I wished I loved investing as much as you or Warren Buffet cause then I would be rich but I don't like it that much. If I become a Historian I will likely be poor haha

I am not sure if Warren Buffet is an Aspie or not, but I do know that Dr. Michael Burry is. He was featured in a book about the mortgage meltdown called "The Big Short" which outlined how he made a tremendous amount of money by shorting the bad loans that Wall St was pushing on the investment community. As an aside, researching about Dr. Burry(and Grigori Perelman) is what led me to WP in the first place.