The article also names Berkshire Hathaway's Ted Weschler as someone who has a large Roth IRA. Weschler's response [1], which is linked from the article, is wort

The article also names Berkshire Hathaway's Ted Weschler as someone who has a large Roth IRA. Weschler's response [1], which is linked from the article, is worth reading. He points out that decades ago he opened an IRA, just like anyone else, and happened to make some good investment decisions and got very lucky along the way: > The magnitude of my Roth IRA is certainly larger than anything I ever would have imagined when I first opened my IRA in 1984 as a 22 year old Junior Financial Analyst making $22,000 a year working for W.R. Grace & Co... > Upon leaving Grace, I transferred my IRA to a self-directed IRA account at Charles Schwab & Co., giving me discretion over the individual investment made in the account. Over the ensuing 29 years (through the end date you quote of year-end 2018) I invested the account in only publicly-traded securities i.e., all investments in this account were investments that were available to the general public... > The investing success of this account has been a function of careful stock selection, exceptional luck and a multi-decade time period. To have a sum of this magnitude built up in my Roth IRA is certainly beyond anything that I ever expected but it was implemented in a way that was available to all taxpayers with an appropriately long investment runway, i.e., the result is exceptional but it is not the product of exclusionary tax strategies. [1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20971124-ted-weschler-statement https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20971124-ted-weschle...