Billionaire Warren Buffett has long pushed his family to think like investors — especially during times like Christmas. From the early 1980s through the early 1990s, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman handed each family member $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills every December, hoping they’d put the cash to work instead of burning through it.
But that wasn’t exactly how things went.
Here’s What Happened
His former daughter-in-law Mary Buffett, who was married to his son Peter from 1980 to 1993, recalled in a 2019 ThinkAdvisor interview (republished by Benzinga in 2025) that the holiday gifts rarely lasted long. “As soon as we got home, we’d spend it, whoo!” she said.
So he changed the rules.
The $10,000 stayed the same, but it now came in the form of stock — starting with shares linked to a Coca-Cola trust — turning Christmas morning into an annual lesson in compounding.
Mary kept hers, later saying, “I thought, ‘Well, [this stock] is worth more than $10,000.’ So I kept it, and it kept going up.”
The next year, Buffett gave the family stock in Wells Fargo in 1990, 10,000 shares, which today, if they were to hold on to those shares worth $10,000 it would about $850,000 today, not including dividends – Wells Fargo traded around $1 a share in 1990; today it’s near $85.
“Then, every year when he’d give us stock — Wells Fargo being one of them — I would just buy more of it because I knew it was going to go up,” Mary said.
Mary described Buffett as an investing obsessive, saying, “That’s all he talked about!” His inner circle mirrored the fixation.
All of Warren’s friends were businesspeople from major companies who gathered with the family at the holidays in Laguna Beach, California, “and they’d all talk about companies. Investing was the only thing Warren ever talked about!”
The Observer (once known as the New York Observer) reported that Mary didn’t give Warren a traditional gift, since he had zero need or desire for material things. Instead, she got creative: newly married, she handed him the balance sheet of the music company she ran with his son Peter, proving the business was profitable, a gesture he absolutely loved.
Even after their marriage ended in 1993, Mary held on to the lessons she learned from Warren, going on to co-found a number of businesses, including the investment firm Sanford DeLand and the Buffett Online School.
She also teaches business and finance classes at UCLA and other universities in California.
