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- Warren Buffett, 93, has more in common with YouTuber Ryan Trahan, 25, than you might think.
- The investor prizes resourceful people who can build fortunes from scratch without cheating anyone.
- Trahan specializes in turning a penny into hundreds or even thousands of dollars within days.
Warren Buffett loves to bet on resourceful people who can turn nothing into something and succeed against the odds. If the 93-year-old investor watched YouTube, he might be a fan of Ryan Trahan.
Buffett's late business partner, Charlie Munger, said the Berkshire Hathaway CEO prizes ingenuity and scrappiness during Wesco's annual meeting in 1987. That's according to Gurufocus, which cited an issue of "Outstanding Investor Digest" that year.
"His definition of a wonderful person is somebody who could fall out of a freight car with no money in a strange town and without cheating anybody become rich without waiting too long. And when he finds one of those, why naturally he's very pleased to back him."
Trahan, a content creator with about 15 million YouTube subscribers, has built his brand around his ability to turn a penny into hundreds or even thousands of dollars in a matter of days.
In 2022, starting with a single cent, he managed to travel from California to North Carolina in the space of 30 days. He did so by swapping the penny for a pen from a passerby, selling the pen for a dollar to another stranger, using the dollar to buy a bottle of water then selling it on for $2, and so on.
Trahan funded his bus trips, Uber rides, and flights by delivering food, walking dogs, mowing lawns, cleaning cars, washing windows, telling jokes, and drawing caricatures for cash.
The celebrity vlogger also borrowed from Buffett's childhood playbook by hawking soda and candy, and finding and flogging used golf balls.
Moreover, in true Buffett style, Trahan lived frugally to make his money stretch further, and even showed the same love of fast food and aversion to vegetables.
He often slept in a hammock to save on accommodation, ordered a lettuce-less McChicken at McDonald's virtually every day, and showered at a gym using a free trial membership.
Trahan also nodded to Buffett — who owns $131 billion worth of Berkshire stock — by investing in assets that would retain their value even if he ran out of cash, such as gift cards, a blanket, and a bicycle.
During one of his earliest penny challenges in 2017, Trahan subscribed to Buffett's value-investing philosophy by sniffing out bargains in thrift stores and online marketplaces, then flipping them for a profit.
There are clear similarities between Buffett and Trahan, including investment savvy and hustle, a taste for junk food and dislike of anything green, and a willingness to live cheaply.
Buffett even hailed the power of a penny during the HBO documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett": "I was delivering 500 papers a day and I made a penny a paper but in turns of compounding that penny's turned into something else," he said.
Trahan may well have taken inspiration from the legendary investor.
"I love this guy's voice," he said about Buffett in a video last fall, in which he jokingly invited the Berkshire chief (with the promise that Coca-Cola would be served) and a raft of other billionaires to his birthday party.
Buffett and Trahan may be several generations apart, but they show that whether you're starting with a cent or you're already a centibillionaire, the ability to make money never gets old.