Kevin O’Leary does not need to hunt for bargains. That has not stopped him from doing it anyway.
The multimillionaire investor recently walked into Walmart armed with a shopping list from his wife and the same cost-conscious mindset he brings to deals on “Shark Tank.” All kinds of home goods were under review. Even at the household level, Mr. Wonderful wanted the numbers to make sense.
Looking For a Bargain
The trip offered an unexpectedly practical glimpse into how O’Leary thinks about money. His estimated $400 million fortune may give him access to nearly anything he wants, but it has not convinced him that paying more than necessary is a smart use of capital.
“I’m always looking for a great deal. That’s why I’m in Walmart,” O’Leary said in an Instagram video. He then pointed to the black jeans he regularly wears and revealed their decidedly non-designer origins.
“These fantastic black jeans I’m always wearing? That’s right — a Walmart special. Twenty-nine smackaroos! That’s how you save dough,” he said.
His shopping list included SodaStream canisters, batteries, butter, Bounty paper towels and OxiClean laundry spray. When O’Leary reached the paper products, he stopped to compare the sizes and number of rolls before making his selection.
“I want to save dough when it comes to paper towels,” he explained. “The list says Bounty, 12-plus rolls. It’s like 18 small rolls. I’m going Plus.”
O’Leary’s Walmart run illustrates a principle familiar to business owners and investors: Every dollar should produce value, and overpaying remains overpaying regardless of who is holding the receipt.
“Inflation affects all of us,” O’Leary wrote alongside the video. “Saving dough is the name of the game. That means focusing on value and always looking for great deals. I know I am!”
His message comes as families continue to face higher prices for food and household necessities.
According to Moneywise, the ConsumerAffairs Datasembly Shopping Cart Index found that a basket of 24 common grocery and household products cost 5.9 percent more in January 2026 than it did one year earlier.
For a household spending $1,000 per month on groceries and essentials, that increase would add about $59 to the monthly bill, or more than $700 annually. O’Leary can absorb that jump. Millions of other shoppers cannot.
His habits also place him in a long tradition of wealthy people whose fortunes never erased their aversion to waste.
Warren Buffett still lives in the Omaha house he purchased for $31,500 in 1958.
The late IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad told Time magazine that he bought clothes from flea markets, drove an old Volvo, and scheduled inexpensive haircuts while traveling abroad.
“I’m a bit tight with money. But so what. I look at the money I’m about to spend on myself and ask myself if IKEA’s customers can afford it,” Kamprad once said. “Having money in abundance doesn’t seem like a good reason to waste it.”
British billionaire John Caudwell displays a similar financial contradiction.
According to The Sun, he owns an elaborate Mayfair mansion and once purchased a helicopter, yet says he wears £29 Zara jeans at home. His approach is selective extravagance, not deprivation. He spends heavily on assets that offer utility, efficiency or meaningful enjoyment while keeping routine purchases simple.
That distinction separates frugality from cheapness. Cheapness focuses only on paying less. Frugality considers what the buyer receives in return.
“I hate wasting money,” O’Leary told CNBC in 2021. “I just don’t get why you would do that. It’s so hard to make it in the first place.”
Despite this, he has been known to spend millions on trading cards.
At the Oscars, O’Leary wore a diamond-encased necklace featuring an ultra-rare, $25M–$30M basketball card with game-worn jersey patches from Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. The high-profile stunt showcased how elite sports cards have evolved into prestigious, fine-art-level alternative investments.
A discounted pair of jeans or a larger pack of paper towels will not create a $400 million fortune. However, the discipline behind those decisions reveals something important. Wealth may provide the freedom to ignore prices, but preserving it often requires remembering why prices still matter.
