Warren Buffett drove his last car for eight years and put just 19,000 miles on it. When it was finally sold, it went for nearly three times what his new one cost. He's one of the richest people alive. For years he drove a Cadillac his daughter called embarrassing. His own explanation, to Forbes in 2014: he only drives about 3,500 miles a year, so he rarely needs a new car. Four lessons hide in his garage. Buy for the miles you actually drive. He kept a Lincoln Town Car for about a decade, then a 2006 Cadillac DTS for eight years. A car you barely use doesn't need replacing every three. Let cosmetic damage pay you. In a BBC documentary, his daughter Susie said he used to buy cars that had been repaired after hail damage, because they came at a discount. A dent doesn't change how a car drives. It changes the price. Keep it until it's embarrassing, not until it's boring. Susie said he keeps a car until she tells him it's getting embarrassing. Then he sent her to the dealership to buy the next one. Know when you've got enough. At a Berkshire meeting he said he has everything in life he wants. The twist: his new 2014 Cadillac XTS cost around $45,000. The old 2006 DTS, with Buffett's history on it, was auctioned for charity for $122,500.

For years Steve Jobs drove a $130,000 Mercedes with no license plate. It was completely legal. California eventually had to change the law to stop it. People photographed his silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for years. There was never a plate on it. Fans assumed he just paid the tickets. The real answer came out after his death, from a former Apple security staffer. California gave the owner of a brand-new car up to six months to put the plates on. So Jobs made a deal with his leasing company. Every six months he handed back his silver SL55 and got an identical new one. His car was never old enough to need a plate. Four things hide in that trick. Read the rules everyone skims. The loophole sat in plain sight in the vehicle code for anyone to find. Know exactly what you’re paying for. Jobs wasn’t saving money. He was paying to keep the car looking the way he wanted. The best deals work for both sides. Twice a year the leasing company got back a barely used Mercedes, previously driven by Steve Jobs. Loopholes have an expiry date. In 2012 California cut the window to 90 days. A law signed in 2016 closed it completely: since 2019, every new car needs at least a temporary plate. People still call it the Steve Jobs loophole.

One of the richest people on Earth has a closet full of the same grey T-shirt. In 2014 someone finally asked him why, in front of a live audience. It was Mark Zuckerberg's first public Q&A, at Facebook's headquarters. About 200 people in the room, the rest watching online. He smiled and said: "You'll be happy to know there are multiples of the same shirt." Then he gave a serious answer. He wanted as few decisions in his life as possible, except the ones about building Facebook. Spending energy on anything silly, he said, would feel like not doing his job. Even choosing breakfast, he said, wears you down. Three things worth stealing from that answer. Make the small choices once. Every morning starts with a dozen tiny decisions. He turned one of them into zero. Buy multiples of what works. He didn't own one grey T-shirt. He owned a rack of them. Put your energy where the return is. He said he got to wake up every day and serve more than a billion people. The shirt wasn't the point. The time was. He wasn't the first. He pointed to Steve Jobs and Barack Obama. Jobs told his biographer he once wanted every Apple employee to wear the same vest. The twist came two years later. On his first day back from paternity leave, Zuckerberg posted a photo of his closet: a row of identical grey T-shirts and grey hoodies. His caption: "What should I wear?"

The most underrated market for self-driving isn't tech guys. It's grandparents. An 80-year-old just let his Tesla handle about 2,800 miles of a 3,000-mile road trip while he supervised. He said that feature alone makes the car a good fit for older drivers. Millions of older people give up long drives because of fatigue, not skill. Every extra year of independent driving is freedom their families can't buy any other way.

In 2006 the fourth-richest man in the world was asked on Swiss TV about his old Volvo. His answer: "It is nearly new, just 15 years old." His name was Ingvar Kamprad. He founded IKEA at 17. That year Forbes put his fortune at $28 billion, behind only Gates, Buffett and Carlos Slim. He flew economy. He drove the old Volvo. He reportedly took salt and pepper packets home from restaurants and got his hair cut on trips abroad, where it was cheaper. Three lessons, and one twist. Lead by example, not by memo. He said he flew economy as an example for IKEA's 90,000 employees. If the founder won't waste money, nobody else can justify it. Small rules build the culture. The interviewer teased him that IKEA staff were told to write on both sides of the paper. Kamprad said he had to do it too. Make thrift a point of pride. He called it a question of good leadership. The twist: reporters later found the same man owned a villa in Switzerland, an estate in Sweden and a vineyard in Provence. The man in the old Volvo also drove a Porsche. And IKEA was built on a network of foundations that kept its tax bill low. The frugality was real. It was also a management tool and a brand.

Sam Walton built Walmart and at one point became the richest man in America. He drove the same base-model 1979 Ford pickup until the day he died, with his hunting dogs in the back. By 1979 Walmart was already doing a billion dollars in sales. That's the year he walked into a local Ford dealer and bought an F-150 Custom, the entry-level trim. Four-speed manual. People kept asking why a billionaire drove a pickup. His answer: "What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?" Four lessons in one old truck. Buy for the job, not the image. He needed to carry dogs to the hunt and drive between stores. A pickup did both. Drive it until it's worn out, not until it's out of style. He kept it for 13 years. By the end the truck bed had rusted through, because the dogs in the back did what dogs do. Status is the most expensive option on any car. He said he didn't believe a big showy lifestyle was appropriate. The money stayed in the business. Habits get passed down. His daughter Alice was named the world's richest woman by Forbes in 2018. She drove a Ford F-150 too. The twist: his truck now sits in the Walmart Museum in Bentonville. Visitors are encouraged to touch the door handle. Legend says it passes on the gift of frugality.

Warren Buffett is one of the richest people on Earth. Every morning he chooses between a $2.61 and a $3.17 breakfast, depending on how the stock market is doing. HBO filmed it in 2017. Buffett, behind the wheel of his Cadillac, at a McDonald's drive-thru. His drive from home to the office takes about five minutes. There's a McDonald's on the way. While he shaves, he tells his wife one of three numbers: $2.61, $2.95 or $3.17. She puts exactly that amount in a cup in his car. $2.61 is two sausage patties. He stacks them and pours himself a Coke. $3.17 is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. On the day HBO filmed, he skipped the $3.17. The market was down, he said, so he went with the $2.95. He's half joking. But four lessons hide in that cupholder. Decide the number before you leave the house. He never stands at the counter deciding. The amount is set while he shaves. Most overspending happens at the moment of choice. Carry exactly what you planned to spend. No change to spare, no "might as well upgrade." Automate the boring decisions. Three options, the same for years. He saves his thinking for things that matter. Know what enough looks like. He has said 99% of what he makes will go to others. A man who could buy the restaurant chain still checks the price of his sandwich.

Warren Buffett has lived in the same $31,500 house since 1958. He admits renting would have made him far more money. He still calls it one of his best investments. The seller wanted $52,500. Buffett got it for $31,500. It's a five-bedroom stucco house from 1921 on a corner lot in Omaha, five minutes from Berkshire's office. In his 2010 letter to shareholders, he ranked it his third best investment ever. "The two best investments were wedding rings." Five lessons hide in that one house. Negotiate like the money isn't coming back. He paid 40% under the asking price. That gap is the only return you lock in on day one. A home is for living, not for betting. Buffett wrote that he'd have made far more money renting and putting the cash into stocks. He bought anyway, because he wasn't buying a stock. Buy what you can afford. He wrote that letter right after the 2008 crash. His point: the goal is a house a family can afford, not the house of their dreams. Count the return you can't sell. For $31,500, he wrote, his family got 52 years of great memories. No stock pays that dividend. Don't upgrade just because you can. He's worth well over $100 billion. The house is worth around $1.4 million. He's never moved.

In 2006 CNN put Mark Zuckerberg on its list of "10 People Who Don't Matter." A year earlier he'd told a camera, barefoot and holding a red plastic cup, that Facebook didn't need to become anything bigger. The clip is five minutes long. It was filmed in Facebook's Palo Alto office in June 2005, for a documentary about millennials. Zuckerberg had just turned 21. Behind him, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is doing a keg stand. Asked what comes after colleges, he shrugs: "There doesn't necessarily have to be more." That company is now Meta. Four lessons hide in those five minutes. Win one small market completely. Harvard had no online student directory. Within weeks of launch, two-thirds of the school had signed up. The plan wasn't the world. It was every one of the 2,000 colleges in the US. Celebrate the milestones nobody else counts. The team marked three million users with keg stands. Three million college kids, no ads, no revenue model anyone believed in. Don't trust the experts' list. CNN's reasoning was simple: MySpace was the 80-million-user gorilla, and who would pay billions for an also-ran? Reed Hastings of Netflix made the same list. Know your price before anyone asks. That spring, Facebook reportedly turned down $750 million and held out for as much as $2 billion. Months later Yahoo offered $1 billion. He said no again. The founder didn't see the ceiling. CNN didn't see it. MySpace didn't see it. The kid with the red cup just kept signing up colleges.

Elon Musk flew to Moscow to buy a rocket. The Russians quoted him a price and laughed. On the flight home he worked out that the parts cost about 2% of what launches usually sold for. That flight is why SpaceX exists. Late 2001. Musk is 30, rich from PayPal, and wants to send a small greenhouse to Mars. He needs a rocket. The cheapest option on Earth: an old Soviet missile. He made three trips to Moscow. In 2003 he told a room of Stanford students about it, on camera, almost casually. His engineer Jim Cantrell later described what happened. Musk came ready to buy three missiles for $21 million. The Russians said $21 million each. One of them reportedly spat on him. Most people would have paid, or given up. Musk opened a spreadsheet. Ask what it's made of, not what it costs. On the plane he listed everything a rocket needs: aluminum, fuel, oxygen, electronics. The raw materials came to around 2% of a typical launch price. The price is a story, not a law. The other 98% was decades of habit, government contracts and nobody asking the question. When the seller laughs, run the numbers. Musk turned his laptop around and told Cantrell they could build the rocket themselves. He founded SpaceX in 2002. On September 28, 2008, Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. Today SpaceX lands its rockets and flies them again.

X just changed what goes viral. Likes matter less now. Attention matters more. Elon announced two updates to the timeline this morning: - A new model that predicts how long you'll spend on a post, and ranks it higher if you'll stay. - A system trained to recommend posts people read all the way to the end. Translation: the algorithm now rewards posts people finish, not posts people tap. What this means if you write on X: Your first line gets the click. Your last line gets the reach. If people drop off halfway, the post dies. Cut every sentence that doesn't pull to the next one. Filler used to be harmless. Now it costs you distribution. Bait gets punished. A shocking hook with nothing behind it means people bounce fast, and X now sees that. Short videos that get watched beat long videos that get skipped. Cut to the moment. The good news: for the first time, depth wins.