Kevin O'Leary has an estimated net worth of $400 million, homes in Florida, Massachusetts and Toronto, and a national television profile built on picking winning investments. He still drives to Walmart for his own jeans.
'I'm always looking for a great deal, that's why I'm in Walmart,' O'Leary said in a recent Instagram video, pointing to the black jeans he wears on camera. 'That's right—Walmart special, 29 smackaroos. That's how you save dough.'
The 72-year-old was sent by his wife to buy batteries, butter, paper towels and OxiClean laundry spray. He couldn't resist comparing package sizes on the Bounty shelf. 'I want to save dough when it comes to paper towels,' he said. 'Bounty—12+ rolls is like 18 small rolls—I'm going plus.'
O'Leary has made the same point before. 'I hate wasting money,' he told CNBC in 2021, after an earlier Walmart run went viral. 'I just don't get why you would do that. It's so hard to make it in the first place.'
He is not the only fortune-holder who never switched off the price-comparison instinct. Warren Buffett, 95, whose net worth sits at roughly $144 billion, still lives in the five-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house in Omaha he bought in 1958 for $31,500. It is now worth more than $1.3 million. For years he let the stock market pick his McDonald's order on the way to the Berkshire Hathaway office, according to a 2017 HBO documentary: two sausage patties for $2.61 on down days, a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit for $3.17 when markets were up.
Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, once worth an estimated $58.7 billion, bought secondhand clothes and drove an old Volvo. 'I don't think I'm wearing anything that wasn't bought at a flea market,' Kamprad said in a 2016 Swedish TV4 documentary. 'I want to set a good example.' He kept working at Ikea until he was 87 and died in 2018 at 91.
Lucy Guo, 31, cofounder of Scale AI and one of the newest members of the billionaire club, keeps a similar habit. A self-described adherent of the FIRE movement, she has skateboarded to work, bought discounted clothing and booked flights she later canceled just to eat for free in American Express airport lounges. 'Everything I wear is free or from Shein,' she told Fortune. 'I still literally buy buy-one, get-one-free on Uber Eats.'
The pattern across four very different fortunes is not coincidence. Capital does not accumulate by accident; it accumulates because someone, at some point, refused to overpay for a paper towel. O'Leary, Buffett, Kamprad and Guo built and kept wealth by treating every purchase as a decision with an opportunity cost—the same discipline that markets reward and that a culture of easy spending, easy credit and government largesse tends to erode.
There is a lesson here for a country whose federal balance sheet shows none of the same restraint. The habits that build a fortune are unglamorous: comparison shopping, driving the old car, skipping the markup. Washington could stand to learn what a $29 pair of jeans already knows.
