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For decades, Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meetings gave shareholders the opportunity to pick former CEO Warren Buffett’s brain on a wide range of topics.

But one investor who attended the conference back in 1999 cut right to the chase.

“Mr. Buffett, how do I make $30 billion?” he asked (1).

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As always, the Oracle of Omaha conveyed complex answers in simple terms. Here are the three crucial rules that helped the 95-year-old accumulate a massive fortune.

Start young

Buffett’s best advice for investors is to get started as early as possible. He has a simple metaphor to explain his wealth-building strategy.

“We started with a little snowball on top of a very tall hill,” he said. “We started at a very early age in rolling the snowball down, and of course, the nature of compound interest is that it behaves like a snowball.”

The length of Buffett’s career is a key piece of his enormous wealth. He bought his first stock at the age of 11. He’s now 95 years old and still actively investing.

The majority of Buffett’s wealth was accumulated after he turned 65. In 1999, his net worth was just $30 billion. Today, he’s the 11th richest person in the world — with a net worth of $140.6 billion (2).

In other words, one of the keys to Buffett’s long-term success was investing early and often.

Roughly 49% of Americans say they don’t invest because they don’t have enough money — believing that you need about $1,000 to even get started, according to the 2025 Modern Wealth Survey conducted by Charles Schwab (3).

Platforms like Acorns are making investing more accessible by letting you invest your spare change from everyday purchases into a diversified portfolio of ETFs.

Just link your cards with Acorns and the platform will automatically round up your expenses to the nearest dollar, investing the spare change in expert-built ETFs managed by top investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard.

You can even get a $20 bonus investment when you sign up with Acorns today.

Read More: Here’s the average income of Americans by age in 2026. Are you falling behind?

Search for small companies

Buffett said that if he started investing again today with $10,000, he would focus on small businesses.