Colossus Gists

It is true that some billionaires are born into wealth while others hustle their way to the top, but The Third Richest Man in the World Warren Buffett is a poster child for the hustlers.

Before the "Oracle of Omaha" earned an average of $2 million a day , he was a scrappy kid working schemes to earn $5,000, or what would be $53,000 today. He stashed the fortune away in his sock drawer.

Alice Schroeder's 2008 biography, "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," chronicles how these efforts established his money-making mentality long before his net worth swelled to $74 billion.

From that telling, here are the young Buffett's best side hustles.

SELLING GUM AND COCA-COLA

At just 6 years old, Buffett earned his first few cents selling sticks of gum in the neighborhood. He carted Juicy Fruit, Spearmint and Doublemint around on a tray and sold them in packs of five for a nickel. When a woman asked for just one stick, little Buffett refused.

"We don't break up packs of gum — I mean, I've got my principles. I still, to this day, remember Mrs. Macoubrie saying she wanted one stick. They were a nickel and she wanted to spend a penny with me," he tells Schroeder.

But Buffett found the margins to be better selling Coca-Cola door to door in the summer, even at the lake when his family vacationed in Iowa.

DELIVERING THE PAPER

At 13, Buffett took what could have been a mind-numbing job as a paper boy and turned it into a competition with himself. With his father representing a Nebraska district in Congress, Buffett woke up at 4:30 in the morning to deliver copies of The Washington Post, and he challenged himself to find ways to serve each of his five buildings faster.

Then he found ways to track when the houses along his route had magazine subscriptions expiring and sold new subscriptions on the side, along with calendars.

By 15, Buffett had made $2,000 delivering papers. He invested $1,200 of that in a 40-acre farm where he had a profit-sharing agreement with a Nebraskan farmer.

STARTING A COMPANY

After he earned enough money working for other people's companies, Buffett began his own. His first was Buffett's Used Golf Balls. He bought refurbished balls from a man in Chicago at $3.50 a dozen and turned them around for $6.

"He probably got them the way we first tried to get them, out of water traps, only he was better," Buffett tells Schroeder.

SCAVENGING 'LOSING' TICKETS AT THE TRACK

While Buffett was still a kid in Omaha, a friend's mother introduced him to betting at Ak-Sar-Ben, a local horse track. While he was too young to gamble, he wasn't too young to make money on what other people carelessly threw away.

"They call that 'stooping,'" Buffett explains, noting that novices were placing bets at the beginning of racing season. "And they'd think that if your horse came in second or third, you didn't get paid, because all the emphasis is on the winner, so they'd throw away place and show tickets."

He and his friend scoured the stands for discarded tickets amidst the cigarette butts, spilled beer and food scraps.

"It was awful; people would spit on the floor. But we had great fun. If I found any winning tickets, my Aunt Alice would cash them in for us, because they wouldn't cash them for kids."

Eventually, he got his high school golf coach to drive him to some local races where he'd make bets after analyzing race statistics. Once he went alone and bet every race only to continue losing as his emotions got the best of him.

"I'd committed the worst sin, which is that you get behind and think you've got to break even that day," Buffett tells Schroeder. "It was the last time I ever did anything like that."

SELLING STAMPS TO COLLECTORS

He set up Buffett's Approval Service, which sold sets of collectible stamps to collectors who lived out of state.

BUFFING CARS

With the help of a friend, he set up Buffett's Showroom Shine, a car-shining business the two young men ran out of his friend's dad's used-car lot. Business turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, however.

Schroeder notes it was abandoned "because it involved manual labor and turned out to be too damn much work."

SETTING UP PINBALL MACHINES IN BARBER SHOPS

When Buffett was 17, he told a friend about an idea with massive potential.

"'I bought this old pinball machine for $25 and we can have a partnership,'" Buffett says in Schroeder's retelling. His friend's side of the deal was to fix it up. Buffett, meanwhile, took care of making the pitch to barbers to let them put the machines in the waiting area in exchange for half the profits.

He claimed to be a representative of the nonexistent "Mr. Wilson's Coin Operated Machine Company."

The idea was a huge success, bringing in $4 in its first night and thrilling the barber. After a week, Buffett walked away with $25 and reinvested it into another machine. He continued until there were seven or eight "Mr. Wilson's machines" making him money around town.

Investing legend Warren Buffett has an estimated net worth of $74 billion, making him the third richest man in the world. But you'd never know it from his lifestyle. The 86-year-old billionaire still lives in the five-bedroom home in Omaha, Nebraska, that he bought in 1958 for $31,500 . And he never spends more than $3.17 on breakfast.

On his five-minute drive to the office, which he's been doing for the past 54 years, Buffett stops by McDonald's and orders one of three items.

"I tell my wife, as I shave in the morning, I say, 'Either $2.61, $2.95, or $3.17.' And she puts that amount in the little cup by me here [in the car]," he explains in HBO's documentary, "Becoming Warren Buffett," which debuted Monday.

Each amount corresponds with a different option at McDonald's.

"When I'm not feeling quite so prosperous, I might go with the $2.61, which is two sausage patties, and then I put them together and pour myself a Coke," he tells director Peter Kunhardt in the documentary.

"$3.17 is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit, but the market's down this morning, so I'll pass up the $3.17 and go with the $2.95."

Buffett proceeds to order a sausage, egg and cheese and pay using exact change.

Susan Buffett didn't find out her father, billionaire Warren Buffett, was rich until her early 20s, and she definitely didn't hear it from her parents.

"I didn’t really have any idea about any money until I was long out of high school and out of Omaha," Susan recently told Business Insider.

"There was an article in the Wall Street Journal at one point when I was probably about 22 or 23, I'd say. That was the first time I was like, 'Oh, there's more going on than I knew about!'"

The founder of the Sherwood Foundation, a children's charity, Susan takes part in a portrait of her father, HBO's "Becoming Warren Buffett," which premiered Monday.

In the documentary, Susan provides intimate details about her parents, growing up in the family's home in Omaha, Nebraska, and what drove her father to give away a large chunk of his fortune to charitable causes.

As for finding out that her father was rich from a news article, she attributes it to her modest upbringing.

"When we were growing up he didn’t have a lot of money and he wasn’t famous," she said. "So we didn’t see anything but a regular, normal situation in our house. He went to the office every day, he came home, he was at the dinner table. He did go upstairs and read the rest of the evening, but he was home. And we lived pretty much like everybody else. Nothing was too different. Really, we lived in what I guess I would describe as an upper-middle-class neighborhood. He still lives in the same house today."

(Warren Buffett sitting between his first wife, Susan, right, and their daughter, Susan, before the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha in 1997.REUTERS/Jeff Taylor)

There were certainly signs that her father was doing well, such as when her mother started a scholarship program when Susan was in high school.

"It was only a couple kids a year, but she started as soon as there was some money there to give away," she said.

After thinking on it more, Susan said there was one visit that gave her an early clue that her father was doing pretty well. Adam Smith, who wrote "Supermoney," a pivotal book about the financial industry, came knocking.

"I may have been a senior in high school then," Susan said. "And I remember Adam Smith came to visit our house in Omaha. And I remember when I heard the name of the book was 'Supermoney,' I was like, 'OK, that’s something.' [Laughs] But I still don’t really think we talked about it."

After graduating from the University of Nebraska in three years, Warren Buffett applied to Harvard Business School .

"They told me I was to get interviewed in a place near Chicago," the iconic investor recounts in HBO's "Becoming Warren Buffett," which debuted Monday. "I got there and they interviewed me for about 10 minutes and said: 'Forget it. You're not going to Harvard.'"

Buffett's first thought was, "What do I tell my dad? This is terrible." But, he says,

"it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me."

The rejection opened the door to Columbia. Later that summer, while looking through a catalog for Columbia Business School, Buffett recognized the names of two professors: Benjamin Graham, the father of value investing, and David Dodd.

"I had read this book ["Security Analysis"] by the two of them, so I wrote them a letter in mid-August," Buffett says. "I said, 'Dear Professor Dodd. I thought you guys were dead, but now that I found out that you're alive and teaching at Columbia, I would really like to come.'

"And he admitted me."

"Ben was this incredible teacher. He was a natural and he drew us all in," Buffett says of Graham. "It was like learning baseball from a fellow who was batting .400. It shaped my professional life."

It was Graham who taught him "the two rules of investing" that Buffett has lived by throughout his massively successful career.