McDonald's breakfasts, one meal a day and beer-fed Wagyu. What billionaires really eat, what the research says, and the cheap core worth copying.
This in-depth guide covers everything you need to know about what do billionaires eat? buffett, musk, brady and more. Based on verified income data and real-world case studies from our database of 138 side hustle tactics.
Billionaires eat in wildly different ways. Warren Buffett has described a McDonald's breakfast and five Cokes a day, Jack Dorsey has described one dinner a day with weekend water fasts, and Tom Brady wrote a book of strict, plant-heavy rules. The research says none of their quirks matter as much as the boring basics they share or skip: fewer ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks, enough protein, and plenty of plants, all of which cost a few dollars a day.
What billionaires eat, person by person
Here is the short version. Every row comes from the person's own words or a named outlet reporting them, with the year, because diets change and a 2015 quote may not describe 2026.
| Person | What they said they eat | Source year | Main pattern |
|---|
| Warren Buffett | McDonald's breakfast up to $3.17, at least five 12 oz Cokes a day | 2015, 2017 | Ultra-processed, high sugar |
| Elon Musk | A donut every morning, "tasty food" over a longer life; credited fasting and Wegovy for weight loss | 2020, 2022, 2023 | Indulgent food plus fasting and a drug |
| Jack Dorsey | One dinner a day on weekdays, water only from Friday to Sunday evening | 2019 | Extreme fasting |
| Mark Zuckerberg | About 4,000 calories a day during MMA training, including a big McDonald's order | 2023 | High energy, high activity |
| Tom Brady | 80 percent "alkalizing" foods, food-combining rules, electrolytes in nearly every drink | 2017 | Plant-heavy, rule-heavy |
| Bryan Johnson | Mostly vegetables, lentils, nuts and berries, last meal around noon | 2026 | Early eating window (full breakdown) |
Look at that table for a second. Two of the richest people alive have publicly praised fast food, one barely eats, and one eats like a man preparing for a cage fight. Which of these would you guess lives longest?
Warren Buffett: McDonald's, Coke and the six-year-old rule
Buffett's diet is the most famous on this list, mostly because he is so cheerful about it.
In a 2015 interview with Fortune, he told Patricia Sellers: "I'm one quarter Coca-Cola." He then did the maths for her: "If I eat 2700 calories a day, a quarter of that is Coca-Cola. I drink at least five 12-ounce servings." He described the split as "I have three Cokes during the day and two at night," and said that morning he had eaten "a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream."
His explanation is a joke with a grain of actuarial logic in it: "I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among six-year-olds. So I decided to eat like a six-year-old."
Then there is breakfast. In the HBO documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, as reported by CNBC in 2018, he explained his drive-through routine: "I tell my wife, as I shave in the morning, I say, 'Either $2.61, $2.95 or $3.17.' And she puts that amount in the little cup by me here." The $2.61 option is two sausage patties, which he puts together and pours himself a Coke. The $3.17 option is a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit, which he skipped on camera because the market was down.
The price tag: at most $3.17 for breakfast at the time of filming, plus five cans of Coke a day. That is the cheapest diet of any billionaire you will read about.
What it adds up to: a 12 oz can of Coca-Cola has 140 calories and 39 grams of added sugar, according to the company's own label. Five cans come to 700 calories and 195 grams of added sugar. The FDA's Daily Value for added sugars is 50 grams on a 2,000 calorie diet. Buffett's Coke habit alone is nearly four times that.
So why is he still going in his nineties? Nobody can answer that from one person. He may have good genes, low stress, a short commute and a life he enjoys. A single long-lived man who drinks soda tells you as much about soda as a single lottery winner tells you about lottery tickets.
Elon Musk: donuts, tasty food and a weight-loss drug
Musk has never published a diet, but he has said a lot in passing.
On Joe Rogan's podcast in 2020 he said, as CNBC reported: "Food's great. I'd rather eat tasty food and live a shorter life." In the same interview he also said "Being overweight is a big deal," and offered a sleep tip: "Eating before you go to bed is a real bad idea, and actually negatively affects your sleep." CNBC reported that he avoids food and alcohol for two to three hours before bed.
In March 2023, when the investor Peter Diamandis posted that sugar is poison, Musk replied: "I eat a donut every morning. Still alive."
The more consequential statement came in October 2022. A follower praised his "fit, ripped and healthy" look, and Musk credited "fasting" and "Wegovy," as the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus reported at the time. Wegovy is semaglutide, a prescription GLP-1 drug. The same report notes the most common side effects are nausea, bloating and changes in bowel habits, with rare serious effects such as inflammation of the pancreas.
Here is the plain reading. Musk's food is ordinary and indulgent. The weight change he talked about came alongside a prescription medicine, which is a medical decision for you and your doctor and has nothing to do with copying a billionaire. The longevity drugs post covers GLP-1 drugs in more depth.
His one habit worth stealing costs nothing: stop eating a few hours before bed.
Jack Dorsey: one meal a day and weekend water fasts
Dorsey's routine set off a storm in 2019 after he described it on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast.
Mother Jones summarised it in May 2019: one meal a day during the week, and nothing but water from Friday until Sunday night. Those five weekly meals were "fish, chicken, or steak with a salad, spinach, asparagus or Brussels sprouts," plus "mixed berries or some dark chocolate for dessert," and some red wine. The same piece quoted Monica Hesse in the Washington Post estimating that he was "consuming fewer than 1,000 calories a day, which is a diet no nutritionist would recommend."
Dorsey's own case for it, quoted by CNBC, was focus: "During the day, I feel so much more focused." That CNBC piece also described a University of Dundee study suggesting hunger can make decisions harder.
The price tag: close to zero. Skipping meals is the one diet that saves money.
The catch: a feeling of focus is real to the person feeling it, but it is a poor test of health. Would you trust a diet whose main evidence is "I feel sharp"?
Mark Zuckerberg: 4,000 calories for fight training
Zuckerberg's diet makes sense only next to his training. He took up jiu-jitsu and MMA, and in 2023 he answered a McDonald's post on Threads with an order: "20 nuggets, a quarter pounder, large fries, Oreo McFlurry, apple pie, and maybe some side cheeseburgers for later?"
He explained why: "Not cutting weight so I need ~4000 calories a day to offset all the activity. And it's so delicious…"
So the man with one of the biggest fortunes on earth fuels hard training partly with fast food. The lesson is about energy balance. Someone grappling several times a week burns far more than someone at a desk, and a meal that would be a problem for you may barely dent his week.
His other food project is more luxurious. In January 2024 he posted that he had "started raising cattle at Ko'olau Ranch on Kauai, and my goal is to create some of the highest quality beef in the world," with Wagyu and Angus cattle that would "grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch."
That is the one item on this page you truly cannot copy. Do you need to?
Tom Brady: the TB12 rules
Brady is the athlete here, but he turned his diet into a business, so he belongs on the list. His 2017 book, The TB12 Method, laid out an average day, and Boston.com walked through it when it came out.
The main rules, in his words as quoted there:
- Water and electrolytes: 20 ounces of water with electrolytes on waking, and 12 to 25 glasses a day. "I add electrolytes to virtually everything I drink."
- Alkaline eating: "I make sure most of what I eat is alkalizing." He aims for 80 percent alkalizing foods such as Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes, and limits "acidifying" foods such as white rice, bread and cold cuts to 20 percent.
- Food combining: no proteins with carbohydrates like potatoes or bread, and fruit eaten alone. "Eat fruits alone," he writes. "They digest quickly. Other foods don't."
- Water timing: "Drink water half an hour before a meal, and then wait an hour before you have your next glass."
- Protein: a shake within 20 minutes of training, and "some days I'll have up to three or four scoops of protein powder."
- Mostly plants: lunch is "often a piece of fish, but always with lots of vegetables," and he "rarely" drinks alcohol.
Boston.com noted the book also promotes his own branded products, including $50 packs of TB12 snacks at the time. He says he likes it: "I enjoy how I eat, and what I eat, and never feel like I'm missing out."
Some of this is excellent and free (lots of vegetables, fish, little alcohol). Some of it has weak or no support, which we will get to. Which of these rules would survive a busy Tuesday in your house?
Bryan Johnson in one row
Johnson runs the most measured diet of anyone here, and it has its own post. The short version: his published daily menu is built mostly on vegetables, lentils, nuts, seeds and berries, though he says he does not identify with any diet camp, and he says he finishes eating around noon, which he says lowers his resting heart rate before bed. For the full menu, cost and routine, read the Blueprint protocol breakdown. For the pills he takes alongside the food, see what supplements billionaires take.
What the evidence says about the patterns
Strip away the names and you get four patterns: fasting, ultra-processed food, high protein, and plant-heavy eating. Here is what good studies say about each.
Fasting and one meal a day
Fasting is popular with tech founders. The best trials say its magic mostly comes from eating less.
So a shorter eating window can help if it makes you eat less, and some people find it easy. It has no special power beyond that in these trials.
The risks are real. Harvard Health lists notable exclusions: people who have diabetes, eating disorders, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or require food with their meds. Dorsey's version, with roughly one meal on weekdays and two-day water fasts, goes far past a simple eating window. Mother Jones, quoting the Washington Post, wrote about the fine line between his routine and clinical eating disorders.
Treat this as general information. If you take medication, have diabetes or heart disease, or have ever struggled with eating, talk to your doctor before you try any fast.
Ultra-processed food and soda
This is where Buffett, Musk's donut and Zuckerberg's McFlurry sit.
- In a tightly controlled 2019 NIH study, 20 adults lived in a clinic and ate either ultra-processed or unprocessed meals for two weeks each, matched for calories offered, sugar, fat, salt and fibre. On the ultra-processed diet they ate about 508 more calories a day and gained about 0.9 kg, and they lost about the same on the unprocessed one.
- A 2024 umbrella review in The BMJ, covering almost 10 million people across 45 pooled analyses, found that more ultra-processed food was linked with higher risk of 32 adverse health outcomes, with convincing evidence for cardiovascular death, type 2 diabetes, anxiety and common mental disorders. These are mostly observational studies, so they show association, and the authors rated much of the evidence as low quality.
Put those together and the safe reading is that fast food and soda make it easy to overeat, and a diet built on them is linked to worse health. One man thriving on Coke changes neither finding.
High protein
Brady's shakes and Zuckerberg's training both point at protein. The US recommended amount is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which Harvard Health describes as roughly the minimum to keep from getting sick.
For people who lift, a 2018 meta-analysis of 49 trials found protein supplements modestly increased muscle and strength gains, with no further gains above about 1.62 g/kg a day. So "three or four scoops" is more than most people need, and eggs, beans, chicken or fish get you to the useful range just as well. How much protein did you actually eat yesterday?
Plant-heavy eating
Brady and Johnson overlap on one thing: lots of vegetables, legumes, nuts and olive oil or fish. That pattern has some of the strongest evidence in nutrition. In the PREDIMED trial of 7,447 Spanish adults at high cardiovascular risk, a Mediterranean diet with extra-virgin olive oil or nuts had a lower combined rate of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths over a median of 4.8 years than advice to cut fat. The original 2013 paper was withdrawn after randomisation problems, and the reanalysis published in 2018 found a similar result.
That is the diet you would design if you wanted the boring answer that works.
Food rules with little behind them
Some of the most quoted billionaire food rules have little or nothing behind them.
- The alkaline diet. A systematic review in BMJ Open found almost no actual research to either support or disprove diet acid load or alkaline water for cancer, and concluded that promoting it to the public for cancer is unjustified. Brady's 80 percent rule mostly works because it is 80 percent vegetables.
- Food combining. A randomised trial in 54 people with obesity compared a "dissociated" food-combining diet with a balanced one at the same calories. Over six weeks in hospital, weight loss was similar, with no extra benefit from food combining.
- "Never drink water with meals." I could not find a controlled trial showing that water at meals harms digestion. Leave it out.
- Soda as a longevity tool. Buffett's actuarial joke is a joke. Sugary drinks are among the main sources of added sugar for most Americans, according to the FDA.
- Extreme fasting for focus. I could not find a trial showing that eating once a day makes healthy people think better, and the small Dundee study CNBC described found that hungry volunteers made more short-sighted choices.
- Luxury ingredients. Beer-fed Wagyu may taste wonderful. Nothing here suggests it does more for your health than a bag of beans.
Are you surprised how much of the famous stuff ends up on this list?
The cheap healthy core
Here is the part you can copy. Across every pattern above, the things with evidence are cheap staples. Prices are US city averages from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for August 2026.
| Staple | Average US price, as of 2026 | Why it earns a place |
|---|
| Dried beans | $1.63 per lb | Protein and fibre, a staple of Mediterranean-style eating |
| Eggs, grade A large | $2.27 per dozen | About 19 cents an egg for complete protein |
| Whole chicken | $2.01 per lb | Lean protein for a few dollars a meal |
| White rice | $1.11 per lb | Cheap energy to pair with beans and vegetables |
| Potatoes | $0.98 per lb | Filling whole food, far from ultra-processed |
| Bananas | $0.65 per lb | Fruit for less than a can of soda |
Add frozen vegetables, oats, a bottle of olive oil and some canned fish and you have the core of the diets with the best evidence. A dozen eggs and a pound of beans together cost about $3.90 at those averages, a little more than the $3.17 Buffett allowed himself for one drive-through breakfast in the 2017 documentary.
What would change if you swapped one soda a day for water and spent the difference on beans and eggs?
Buffett's $3.17 money lesson
There is a quiet money lesson in Buffett's breakfast. CNBC put his fortune at an estimated $86 billion in 2018, and he still counted out $3.17. He spends little on things that do not matter to him so he can keep compounding the things that do. You can borrow that habit without borrowing the Coke. Money saved on soda, takeaway and branded supplements is money you can put to work, and the index investing guide shows the simplest way to do that.
If food costs are what keep you on the edge each month, the guide to escaping paycheck-to-paycheck living is a practical next read. And if you want to know what "enough" looks like before chasing billionaire habits at all, the how much money is enough post sets that line. Habits beyond the plate, from reading to ownership, are in habits of rich people.
Your eating plan this week
You do not need a chef, a ranch or a protocol. Try this for seven days:
- Cut one sugary drink a day. Replace it with water or sparkling water. Cost: about zero.
- Cook one pot of beans. A pound of dried beans is about $1.63 and covers several meals.
- Hit a sensible protein target. Aim for at least 0.8 g per kilogram of body weight, more if you lift, from eggs, beans, chicken or fish.
- Fill half your plate with vegetables at two meals a day. Frozen counts.
- Stop eating two to three hours before bed. This is Musk's one habit worth keeping, and it is free.
- Skip the expensive extras. No alkaline water, no food-combining charts, no branded snacks.
If a shorter eating window helps you eat less, it is a fine tool for many healthy adults. Keep it gentle, and talk to your doctor first if you take medication, have diabetes or have a history of disordered eating.
Which of these six would be easiest for you to start tomorrow? Start with that one.