What Warren Buffett and Tony Elumelu’s legendary lives tell us, By Adeola Akinremi

In a deeply personal and reflective letter to shareholders at the end of 2025, America’s billionaire investor, Warren Buffett, reminded the world that while money matters, the highest purpose of wealth is what it makes possible for others. At 95, the “Oracle of Omaha” accompanied his words with an extraordinary act of generosity: converting 1,800 Class A Berkshire Hathaway shares into 2.7 million Class B shares and donating approximately $1.35 billion to four family foundations.

It was another step towards fulfilling his pledge to give away 99 per cent of his fortune during his lifetime. That commitment has already seen him transfer well over $60 billion, with the cumulative value of those gifts now exceeding $200 billion at today’s market prices.

What is remarkable is not merely the scale of Buffett’s philanthropy, but its quiet consistency. While many billionaires spend their later years preserving wealth, Buffett has spent his distributing it, not in search of applause but in pursuit of impact.

The beneficiaries tell their own story. The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation expands educational opportunities and supports reproductive health globally. The Sherwood Foundation invests in public education, affordable housing and community development. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation combats hunger, strengthens food security and supports communities affected by conflict. The NoVo Foundation focuses on advancing the rights of women and girls while building more just societies.

These donations add to the billions Buffett has previously given to the Gates Foundation. His fortune is not being buried in endowments; it is being converted into opportunities for generations he will never meet.

In Nigeria, Tony Elumelu is pursuing a related mission, though through a distinct African context. Like Buffett, he has committed much of his life to creating opportunities for people he may never know personally. Yet Elumelu’s intervention is especially significant on a continent where access to capital remains one of the greatest obstacles to enterprise, innovation and inclusive growth.

His investments are in people with ideas, discipline and business capacity, people capable of transforming not only their own lives but also their communities and economies.

This week, Elumelu stepped down as Chairman of the United Bank for Africa, UBA, closing one of the most consequential chapters in modern African banking. He leaves not because his influence has diminished, but because institutions endure only when leadership outlives personalities.

His departure from UBA marks the end of an era, but not the end of his life’s work. In January 2027, he is expected to assume the chairmanship of Seplat Energy, bringing to the energy sector the philosophy that helped transform a Nigerian bank into one of Africa’s most recognisable financial institutions.

The temptation is to compare Elumelu with Buffett simply because both are billionaires who have embraced philanthropy. That comparison, although flattering, misses the deeper connection. Both men understand that capital achieves its highest return not when it compounds in investment portfolios, but when it compounds through people.

Long before he became synonymous with Africapitalism, Elumelu was a young salesman trying to persuade customers to buy photocopiers. It is a story he has often recalled with humour and gratitude. Selling office machines was hardly glamorous, but it taught him lessons that no business school could replicate: resilience after rejection, discipline in preparation, respect for customers and the dignity of earning every opportunity.

Every sale required persuasion. Every rejection demanded persistence. It was there, long before the boardrooms and billion-dollar deals, that he learned that success is rarely inherited; it is earned one conversation at a time.

That formative experience explains much about the man he would become. Unlike many philanthropists whose giving is shaped by abundance, Elumelu’s worldview was shaped by opportunity, or more precisely, by the scarcity of it.

He has often spoken about applying for jobs despite lacking every qualification listed in the advertisement, relying instead on courage, preparation and the willingness of someone to take a chance on him. The memory of those early struggles now echoes through every entrepreneur supported by the Tony Elumelu Foundation.

Whether through Heirs Holdings, Transcorp, UBA or the Tony Elumelu Foundation, Elumelu has consistently pursued institution-building rather than transactional success. His philosophy is grounded in a simple conviction: institutions should survive their founders. Transactions do not.

Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than at UBA.

Elumelu, a proud economist made in Africa, demonstrated that African economic growth can be driven by African capital, African institutions and African leadership. He led the acquisition and transformation of the former United Bank for Africa at a time when Nigerian banking was still largely organised around domestic ambitions.

While many financial institutions viewed international expansion as an extension of prestige rather than strategy, Elumelu imagined something different. He saw Africa not as 54 isolated markets, but as an emerging economic community requiring financial infrastructure capable of supporting intra-African trade, investment and entrepreneurship.

That vision fundamentally altered UBA’s trajectory.

Today, UBA’s presence stretches across Africa and into major international financial centres. It connects African businesses to global capital while supporting trade across the continent. The bank became not merely larger, but more relevant to Africa’s economic integration.

Long before the African Continental Free Trade Area entered mainstream policy discussions, UBA was already building much of the financial architecture that such integration would require.

One of the defining characteristics shared by Buffett and Elumelu is their willingness to leave institutions stronger than they found them. Buffett spent years preparing Greg Abel to succeed him at Berkshire Hathaway. Elumelu, similarly, leaves UBA with governance structures, strategic clarity and leadership continuity capable of sustaining the institution beyond its founding generation.

“I leave the Board with great confidence in UBA’s future. Emmanuel Nnorom is a leader of integrity, experience and sound judgment, and I am confident that the Bank will continue to thrive under his leadership,” Elumelu said in a statement announcing his retirement.

That act of preparing a strong successor speaks volumes about the leadership of Buffett and Elumelu, a leadership measured not only by expansion but also by succession.

In an era when too many organisations remain hostage to the personalities of their founders, both men have demonstrated that the ultimate responsibility of leadership is to make oneself replaceable.
That lesson may become even more consequential at Seplat Energy.

Africa’s energy future is entering one of the most complex transitions in its history. The continent must simultaneously expand energy access, attract capital, improve governance and respond to global decarbonisation pressures. This is not merely a commercial challenge; it is an institutional one.

Elumelu’s next boardroom role at Seplat, therefore, represents more than another prestigious appointment. It offers an opportunity to apply decades of experience in governance, capital allocation and institution-building to one of Nigeria’s most strategically important sectors.

If his stewardship at UBA was about building financial infrastructure for African commerce, his stewardship at Seplat could prove equally significant in strengthening indigenous leadership within Africa’s evolving energy landscape.

There is another lesson worth drawing from Buffett. The billionaire from Omaha famously observed that someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree many years ago. Tony Elumelu has spent much of the past two decades planting institutions instead of monuments. Seplat may yet become the next.

Years from now, balance sheets will have changed, market capitalisations will fluctuate, and today’s rankings of Africa’s richest individuals will almost certainly be forgotten. What will endure are institutions capable of creating opportunity long after their founders have left the stage.

John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Joseph Pulitzer, Andrew Mellon and Pierre Samuel du Pont are historical figures whose legacies endure not merely because of their wealth, but because of the institutions and ideas they left behind.

Their examples should continue to inspire Elumelu’s journey.

That is the true measure of legendary leadership.

History rarely remembers those who accumulated the most wealth. It remembers those who expanded the number of people able to create wealth for themselves. Warren Buffett understood that truth. Tony Elumelu has spent a lifetime proving that Africa can do the same.

As he leaves UBA for his next chapter, the real legacy he carries is neither a title nor a fortune, but an idea: that the highest return on capital is not measured in dividends, but in dignity, enterprise and opportunity.

If Buffett taught the world that giving away wealth can become the final act of great capitalism, Elumelu is demonstrating that creating new capitalists may be the greatest gift of all.

Adeola Akinremi is a public policy advisor, strategic communications expert, and the founder and CEO of Hintells, an AI-powered intelligence platform serving businesses and African diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. He has extensive multilateral experience advising on governance, economic and policy reforms across global markets and can be reached at: [email protected]