What I love about the extremely wealthy is their unwillingness to admit the role luck plays in their success.

They'll tell us "hard word, dedication, " and blah blah blah are the reasons they are successful.

Tell that to the guy that comes home from work, sore, completely exhausted, with barely enough food for his family.

Tell that to the millions of people who work 50+ hours every week, toiling in shameful employment that doesn't pay a living wage.

And now, Buffett wants to claim his spouse was the most important decision in his life? Nah.

Buffett had accumulated about 107k (in today's money) by the time he finished college (not counting his dad's businesses and fall-back money he had available to him to take risk without worry).

He was relatively successful before he ever finished college, so him marrying had nothing to do with it.

Also, Susan and Warren had a, somewhat forced, open-relationship and he lived with another woman while married to Susan.

Warren's relationship with a WaPo publisher (Katherine Graham) ticked off his wife who then started cheating on Buffett with a tennis guy.

Susan left Warren but later introduced him to Astrid Menks, who was friends with Susan and they all three had a 'thing'.

Buffett would eventually marry Astrid after Susan died.

So, Buffett trying to attribute his success to his 'wife' is bologna. Don't listen to what rich people say - watch them.

Rich people are full of themselves and are often not truthful about how they became "successful," (though I don't define success as accruing wealth anyway).

Luck, circumstance, and position in life have a lot more to do with whether a person becomes "successful" or not but those rich folk won't admit it.

It reminds me of Bill Pulte. This guy swears up and down he's not "giving away his inheritance," yet everything he has came from his inheritance. Everything. His grandpa left him a thriving business, a massive payout, and anything Bill wanted to pursue, he had no fear of loss when taking risks because his family was wealthy and knew they would prop him up should any of his ventures fail.

That's another huge thing - wealthy people almost always come from other wealthy people. It's easy to gain wealth on your own when growing up you don't have to worry about "risking everything."

The kids of wealthy parents will fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, succeed, then attribute NONE of the success to the fact that every time they failed, they had a safety net to make them whole again so they could then pursue something else.

People that grow up poor? They have no such safety net. They have near-zero opportunity to correct themselves after they take a risk and fail. Because of this, they tend to go to work, work their butts off, and maybe they're compensated well for it, but mostly not.

Please, Warren .... spare us your nonsense theories. Yeah, it's important to choose a good spouse, but if you're choosing a spouse to help boost your portfolio, then your priorities are pretty screwed up, I'd say.

As for the study cited - the study is an example of poor scientific method. There was no control for spouses who come from the same socioeconomic level.

We know that wealthy families befriend wealthy families. We know that wealthy people befriend wealthy people. When you go to a college, such as the one Buffett attended, you are then surrounded by people who, mostly, have the same socioeconomic background as you.

So measuring financial success, when looking at rich people who grew up rich, will give you skewed data when you do not control for these very important factors.

Buffett, show me a study that does that and maybe I'll care.