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Noted value investor Guy Spier first gained the public’s attention in 2007 when he and a partner paid more than $650,000 at a charity auction to have lunch with the world’s most famous value investor, Warren Buffett.
Spier, who calls Buffett his hero, launched his Zurich-based fund Aquamarine in 1997. He mimicked the Oracle of Omaha’s investing philosophy, anchored on the premise of compounding interest. Spier hoped the approach would help him build a similarly long-lasting, albeit more modest, investing legacy for Aquamarine.
And for years, it worked. From 1997-2025, Aquamarine’s total returns outpaced the S&P 500, long seen as the ultimate benchmark for a fund’s success. But in November 2024, while returning from a ski trip with his family, a medical emergency forced Spier to confront the realities of his own mortality, and redefine how he decides what holds value in life.
“It was a super cold day in November, and on the car journey back to Zurich, I had a grand mal seizure,” Spier recalled in an interview for the CNBC Cures’ podcast “The Path with Becky Quick.”
“I was sitting next to my wife in the car. She didn’t know what was going on,” Spier said during the interview, which was conducted at the recent Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting.
Spier was flown to a hospital where he was given an MRI.
“I wake up the next day and I discover that I’ve got a brain tumor, and my life changed completely on that date,” Spier said.
It was a grade 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive and fast-growing form of brain cancer. Glioblastomas are rare, impacting roughly 4 out of every 100,000 people. There are no truly effective treatments for the disease, with the median survival for a patient lasting just 15 months after diagnosis. The five-year survival rate is less than 7%. Those figures have not changed in decades.
In the year following his diagnosis, Spier had multiple surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from his brain. But after the cancer returned following his second resection, he realized the standard of care treatment would not be enough to keep the disease at bay.
“The tumor is within. It’s like seeds in the ground, if you like, or fungus. It just like grows everywhere. So they can’t completely resect it. And even if you get complete resection, you have some that’s remaining,” Spier said.
Shutting down a money-making fund, savoring life
Spier began to reprioritize his life. He knew that he could not continue to run Aquamarine. Earlier this year, he gave his investors their money back, and in his annual letter, provided a moving and emotional explanation of why he was shuttering the fund. Spier said it was a gut-wrenching decision.
“It’s a miserable thing to have to write about the fact that you wind down your fund,” Spier said. “The way your life … or you thought your life would be going … I mean, it’s not the way you want. It’s a tragedy in a way, and it’s an awful thing.”
But ultimately, Spier said the decision was freeing. It has reminded him to value the time he has with loved ones over the pursuit of accumulating wealth, and allowed him to look for opportunities to savor life.
“Suddenly I don’t have all the time in the world,” Spier said. “The batting average of the Grim Reaper is 100%. He gets us all in the end.”
Spier, who said he hates equating his remaining days with a battle against cancer, said he prefers to view it as a game with death where you earn points for every day you’re alive. He says his goal is to accumulate as many points as possible, and to enjoy those days as much as he can.
Noting the median survival rate of 15 months, he said, “Somehow I’m going strong. So every day it’s basically a gift, so I might as well celebrate. I’ve been using NetJets a lot more. I’ve been flying business and first class a lot more. We got an expensive bottle of wine last night.”
That does not mean that Spier is immune from grieving.
“I’m grieving that I won’t maybe see my grandchildren ever, or I won’t see my children get married, or I won’t see my children graduate from university. … Who cares about money at that point?”
Spier, pictured here with his family, says he grieves knowing that he will not likely see his children hit life’s important milestones.Guy Spier
Spier also said that there are times that he wishes he did more with his life than just trying to make money in the stock market. “You see these great people working for their whole lives to make some discovery that may make our lives better,” Spier said. “I do have some regrets in that regard.”
But Spier also knows that his wealth can help make a difference in the lives of others diagnosed with glioblastomas.
Glioblastoma patients face a dire outlook. Without an effective treatment, those who receive a diagnosis are often left in a sort of limbo where opting out of traditional approaches to cancer — like chemo, radiation and surgery — can result in a shorter life. But moving forward with those treatments, while it can add months to their lives, can have a devastating mental and physical toll. A novel approach is needed.
Spier compared the glioblastoma patient population to trying to fill a bathtub with an open drain. Each year more and more people are diagnosed with glioblastomas. But because they die so quickly, the population of people living with the disease never grows enough to make finding a treatment an attractive investment target for big pharmaceutical companies.
“You have the number of people getting the disease, but the bathtub never gets to get filled with the focus groups and support groups, because it’s being emptied the whole time,” he said.
Spier hopes that this is where he can have an impact.
Spier is determined to use his platform to raise awareness for glioblastoma, and is pushing for new treatments for others diagnosed with the disease.Guy Spier
“Maybe I should fund some of that research. I could take a certain chunk of the money that I built up and fund it, and I’m willing and happy to do it,” he said.
And that is the message Spier wants to spread. He wants to use his platform to increase awareness of the disease that he and so many others like him are living with.
“There are many gaps in what we could be doing to advance cures for rare diseases which just need a little bit more attention,” Spier said. “I will probably make investments for a good reason, and I will know that I’m not doing it to make money. I’m doing it to further science.”
Even if Spier’s earlier career ambition of building Aquamarine into an investing institution that could last for decades into the future is no longer feasible, he now finds himself in the position of being able to use the tools that he developed in a life spent studying financial markets as a means to help improve the lives of thousands of desperate families searching for hope.
It’s a legacy that’s worth remembering — and a life that has the potential to offer value for generations to come.
More information about glioblastoma can be found at the Glioblastoma Foundation. For more stories like this, sign up for the CNBC Cures Newsletter and checkout CNBC Cures online.
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