Book Review: Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist By the time Warren Buffet was 17, he had read more than a hundred business books. By age 11, he was earning and saving. By age 14, he began paying taxes to the US Government. When he graduated high school, he had 5,000 dollars he had saved from his newspaper sales business. Even before he had $100,000, Warren Buffet worried that becoming rich would spoil his children. Warren Buffet had always loved numbers. Before he was ten, he knew the statistics of every state in the US. Numbers were his thing.