Stewart Horejsi

After graduating from the University of Kansas, Stewart Horejsi had ambitions of heading to Wall Street, but instead went home to Salina, Kansas, to help with his father's company -- a distributor of industrial, medical and specialty gases. Still he's proven his investment savvy: Shortly after reading John Train's "The Money Masters" in 1980, Horejsi (pronounced hor-ish) began buying up shares of Berkshire Hathaway for as little as $265 per share, attending board meetings with fewer than a dozen people sitting in folding chairs. Today he still holds some of those shares -- worth roughly $225,000 each -- but he also has nearly $400 million in four closed-end mutual funds known as The Boulder Funds, bought with proceeds from earlier Berkshire sales. Horejsi and his wife Ellen split time between homes in Arizona, Oregon and Barbados, where he purchased an 18th-century plantation beach house formerly owned by Claudette Colbert.