If youve always wanted to know who Warren Buffett is and how he got so rich, this was the week for you!

Nearly 50 years ago, Warren Buffett and his investors took control of the textile mill company Berkshire Hathaway. You probably know what happened after that. Berkshire brk.a has become a hugely successful conglomerate, and Buffetts investment vehicle. And Buffett has become the worlds third richest man.

To mark the anniversary, Buffett included a special section in his annual letter to shareholders, which came out last Saturday, about his past 50 years in business. Responding to Buffetts special section, nearly everyone on the Internet wrote a think piece on what has made Buffett the most successful investor of all time. (Well, not everyone. But many financial journalists.) In response to all those posts, I have collected all of the reasons everyone came up with and put it all in one chart.

What does my chart say? A lot! Part of the allure of Warren Buffett is that he makes what he does sound so simple. He buys good companies at fair prices, says Joe Nocera at The New York Times . and he doesnt get taken in by the latest investing fad. The lesson to learn from Buffett is to be yourself, says Barry Ritholtz. Its easy.

But look at the chart! There are nine bubbles, 15 potential reasons hes so rich, and not a lot of overlap. Look at the middle of the chart. Matt Levine of Bloomberg says Buffett is successful because he buys and sells stocks. (Also because he is so cuddly.) Right next it: A bubble for an article from Lex Haris at CNNmoney that said that if you want to be rich like Buffett, the key thing to do is buy and hold. i.e. never sell. Buffett is successful because he is able to do a lot of stuff really well. And hes able to do contradictory stuff. again really well.

Second, Buffett is often thought of being the best investor to ever walk the planet. But if you look at the chart, the bubbles are doubled up and much more crowded on the right side. That suggests that more of Buffetts success—or perhaps just how his success is perceived by financial journalists—seems to be on account of his personality. not his ability to pick stocks.

If anything, the chart suggests that Buffett has been so successful because he is willing to be flexible. In his letter to shareholders, as Andrew Ross Sorkin points out. Buffett warns that Wall Street and investment bankers are always trying to get companies to do foolish things, like bad acquisitions or spin-offs, just to earn a fee. Buffett says most companies and managers would be better off ignoring investment bankers. Yet one of Buffetts largest investments is Goldman Sachs, which is filled with bankers trying to get companies to do things so they can collect fees. That might make Buffett seem a bit hypocritical, but isnt the world better off because Buffett is willing to point out the problems of Wall Street even if he also knows there are profits to be made?

Its also important to learn from your mistakes. Buffett is the original activist investor. He took over Berkshire and tried to run it himself. And it was a disaster. That is likely what led him to the hands-off strategy that has made every other business that Berkshire has bought such a success. Buffett is fortunate to have experienced such fallout early enough in his career that he could bounce back.

Staying flexible, taking advantage of your good fortune, and being willing to learn from your mistakes. Like most things you can learn from Buffett, all of those items serve as pretty good life advice. And these three items will probably make you a better investor, businessperson, and perhaps even richer; though $72 billion richer is probably a stretch.

Graphic by Analee Kasudia.

Clarification: An earlier version of this story said that Warren Buffett was the worlds second richest man. In fact, by the latest rankings, he is the third.

Sometimes when Warren Buffett loves a product—Sees Candies and Dairy Queen ice cream, to name two—he buys the company. Or he voraciously acquires shares in the business—as hes done with Coca-Cola KO. to the tune of $16 billion.

So its hardly surprising that Buffett, who eats Utz Potato Stix as if a famine could imminently wipe out the worlds potato supply, has considered buying the company that sells them. The Berkshire Hathaway CEO told Fortune this last week, and when I wrote about it last week in a story about Buffett eating like a six-year-old, little-known Utz Quality Foods of Hanover, Pennsylvania, got besieged by acquisition rumors.

Believe me, were not for sale, insists Utz CEO Dylan Lissette, who is generally so media-shy that he doesnt even issue press releases for major news about the company. But with Buffett going public about his affection for Utz, Lissette is game to let a few secrets of the snack makers success out of the bag. First and foremost, by staying private, he says, You actually get to invest the way youre supposed to invest. Its not about short-term results.

Founded in 1921 in William and Salie Utzs tiny kitchen, Utz started as a simple potato-chip company and is now a producer of a broad range of snack foods: pretzels, popcorn, cheese balls and, yes, chips in 395 different flavors and iterations including Crab and new Yuengling BBQ. Last year, Utz produced 150 million pounds of snacks in its 11 manufacturing plants and brought in $561 million in revenue. That makes the company a peewee compared to the snack market leader, PepsiCos PEP Frito-Lay North America (2014 revenue: $14.5 billion). But Utz, which employs 2,500 people, earns healthy profits that it constantly puts back into the business, without fear of reprisal by activist shareholders. Weve grown because we have the ability to reinvest, says Lissette.

Utz Quality Foods CEO Dylan Lissette

Now in his 20th year working for Utz, Lissette stumbled into the business as a college student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He fell in love with the owners daughter, who was going to law school at GW. Mike Rice, the grandson of Utzs founders, is now Lissettes father-in-law and executive chairman of the company. Lissette, who started out running registers in Utz outlet stores in 1995 and climbed the ranks through sales and marketing, became president and COO three years ago and moved up to chief executive last year.

Lissette, 43, and his wife, Stacie, own a minority piece of the business, while Mike and Jane Rice own the majority. The family dynamic is healthy. We have a very small number of shareholders, and that makes us very agile and much more competitive, says Lissette. We dont have to go through lengthy approval processes.

For instance, two years ago, Utz spent aggressively to expand across the south, where Lissette believes future Utz customers are migrating. We went from zero to 60, he says. Well probably lose money in the market for five years. Its a long-term investment.

Utz has also expanded by acquisition. In 2011, Utz purchased the Dirty and Zapps brands of potato chips because the same craft trend that altered the beer market has hit the snack market. People want products that are interesting, says Lissette, who was attracted to the gourmet deli image and Cajun crawdaddy voodoo heritage of the products. In 2012, Utz bought Bachman, known primarily for pretzels, but, says Lissette, they have a great cheese curl brand, Jax. And a year ago, Utz acquired a brand called Good Health to become more relevant in the good-for-you category—which is on fire, he says.

You wont find Good Health products on the Utz website because we dont want to tout that its owned by people like us. The Utz CEO explains: Imagine if Smashburger were owned by McDonalds MCD. or your favorite craft beer were owned by Anheuser-Busch ABI . Founded by a French entrepreneur in North Carolina, Good Health is now based in San Diego and operates independently from Utz, which provides capital and production and distribution capabilities. With Utzs help, Good Healths sales grew 33% in the past year.

Neither Lissette nor anyone else in Utz management was looking for an outside investor when Buffett got interested in the company in 2010. But an odd thing happened. Lissettes twin brother, Jamie, sent a letter to Buffett after a plan to merge Utz with Snyders, a rival a few miles down the road in Hanover, hit the skids. The FTC blocked the pending merger, and Utz and Snyders LNCE nixed the deal. Dear Mr. Buffett, I write on behalf of my twin brother…, wrote Jamie Lissette, who is the familys true money guy and the founder/CEO of Hammerstone Markets, which operates a news and analysis service for institutional traders.

Buffett looked at Utzs numbers and contemplated buying the company, but he says, Unfortunately size was the issue, and it never went anywhere.

Between nibbles of his Utz PotatoStix (I have a can in my lap and a Coke on my desk. Im having my lunch.), Buffett directs me to his just-released letter to shareholders in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report. I say that were looking for companies with $75 million in pretax earnings and preferably a whole lot more, which is what you need to make a dent on $350 billion of market value. That sum—well, actually $362 billion—is the stock-market capitalization of Berkshire Hathaway brk.a .

People would have to eat an awful lot of potato sticks to make a dent in that, Buffett says.

So, it looks like Utz will keep growing on its own—Lissette says he thinks $1 billion in revenue is doable in five years. As for Buffett, hes perfectly content shelling out $3.98 for his 15-ounce cans of Utz Potato Stix, without ever owning the company.

Warren Buffett embarked on an epic diatribe against investment bankers in his latest letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, published Saturday. He mentioned bankers 10 times in the long letter, not once generously. As The New York Times noted. Buffett painted investments bankers as nearsighted and self-serving and pressing for deals that aren’t always in the best long-term interest of their clients.

While Buffett long has jabbed gleefully at bankers, he also has tossed them praise from time to time. He also knows quite well what hes talking about, having been closely involved in running and owning businesses with major investment banking divisions. It could be that hes angrier than usual about the bankers. Or something else could be at work in the masterful investors mind: If he can convince just one CEO or owner or controlling family of a major private company to sell to Berkshire without running a banker-led auction first, his borderline intemperate jeremiad will have been a giant success.

To review, Buffett loves to take potshots at investment bankerseven when he is praising them. He singlehandedly changed the career trajectory of Byron Trott, then with Goldman Sachs, when Buffett praised the banker in 2004 for having brought him a good deal. It hurts me to say this, Buffett wrote his shareholders, and then wrote Trott had earned his fee. Four years later Buffett was at it again, damning investment bankers with more-than-faint praise for Trott, calling him the rare investment banker that puts himself in his clients shoes.

Over the weekend, Buffett had nothing at all kind to say about any banker. (He didnt mention Trott, who had suggested to Fortune late last year that he soon could be dealmaking with Buffett again.) Admonishing companies in which he has invested for having traded stock of greater intrinsic value for the stock of a company they had acquired, Buffett wrote, I’ve yet to see an investment banker quantify this all-important math when he is presenting a stock-for-stock deal to the board of a potential acquirer. The reason, of course, is that bankers are paid fees based on the size of the transactions on which they advise, not the success of the transaction for their clients. The arrangement clearly infuriates Buffett. In striving to achieve the desired per-share number, a panting CEO and his helpers will often conjure up fanciful synergies. (As a director of 19 companies over the years, I’ve never heard dis-synergies mentioned, though I’ve witnessed plenty of these once deals have closed.) Post-mortems of acquisitions, in which reality is honestly compared to the original projections, are rare in American boardrooms. They should instead be standard practice.

In case you were wondering, the helpers Buffett is referring to are investment bankers.

Buffett didnt stop there. He criticized the value of so-called fairness opinions, a document a banker prepares for a client so they can cover their rear ends with their boards regarding the price and other terms of a transaction. He mocked Wall Streets willingness to believe in the logic of deals, especially when bankers are earning large fees. He lamented that bankers, being paid as they are for action, urge premium payments on their clients even if the premium destroys the investment rationale of an acquisition.

Buffett, of course, knows investment banking well. He once stepped in to run Salomon Brothers, in which he had previously invested. Goldman Sachs remains a major holding after he personally bailed out the company in the financial crisis. Wells Fargo, Buffetts largest holding, with a market value for Berkshire of $26 billion, long disdained investment banking. But when it bought Wachovia in a firesale it retained the disgraced banks investment banking operation. (Wells CEO John Stumpf has publicly dismissed a desire to rank high in investment banking league tables of deal value. Instead, Wells aims to provide investment banking services to its banking clients who need it.)

So its fair to take Buffett at his word that he doesnt much care for investment bankers, his positive experiences with some of them notwithstanding. All that said, the growth of Berkshire is predicated on Buffett being able to find more amazing deals. And if he succeeded in planting seeds of doubt in the mind of just one owner of a multi-billion-dollar private company who decides to sell to himand not to the higher-paying corporation the bankers are recommendinghe will have achieved a goal of a higher purpose, and one that investment bankers can well understand: making more money for himself and his shareholders.