FT Business Book of the Year

Best business books

All the books longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

The Snowball by Alice Schroeder

The Snowball

Warren Buffett has been ahead of the curve for most of the past 50 years, making him one of the world’s richest people. Alice Schroeder’s massive authorised biography provides some clues about how he’s done it. — Read the complete FT review

Synopsis

The Snowball is the first and will be the only biography of the world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, written with his full cooperation and collaboration.
Combining a unique blend of “The Sage of Omaha’s” business savvy, life story and philosophy, The Snowball is essential reading for anyone wishing to discover and replicate the secrets of his business and life success.

Warren Buffett is arguably the world’s greatest investor. Even as a child he was fascinated by the concept of risk and probability, setting up his first business at the age of six. In 1964 he bought struggling Massachusetts textile firm Berkshire Hathaway and grew it to be the 12th largest corporation in the US purely through the exercise of sound investing principles - a feat never equalled in the annals of business.

Despite an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion, Buffett leads an intriguingly frugal life taking home a salary of only £50,000 a year. His only indulgence is a private jet, an extravagance he wryly acknowledges by calling it “The Indefensible”. In 2006, he made the largest charitable donation on record, with most of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Snowball provides a comprehensive, richly detailed insight one of the world’s most extraordinary and much loved public figures.