The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [0]
Title Page
Dedication
It is the winter of Warren’s…
PART ONE / The Bubble
1: The Less Flattering Version
2: Sun Valley
3: Creatures of Habit
4: Warren, What’s Wrong?
PART TWO / The Inner Scorecard
5: The Urge to Preach
6: The Bathtub Steeplechase
7: Armistice Day
8: A Thousand Ways
9: Inky Fingers
10: True Crime Stories
11: Pudgy She Was Not
12: Silent Sales
13: The Rules of the Racetrack
14: The Elephant
15: The Interview
16: Strike One
17: Mount Everest
18: Miss Nebraska
19: Stage Fright
PART THREE / The Racetrack
20: Graham-Newman
21: The Side to Play
22: Hidden Splendor
23: The Omaha Club
24: The Locomotive
25: The Windmill War
26: Haystacks of Gold
27: Folly
Photo Insert One
28: Dry Tinder
29: What a Worsted Is
30: Jet Jack
31: The Scaffold Sways the Future
32: Easy, Safe, Profitable, and Pleasant
33: The Unwinding
PART FOUR / Susie Sings
34: Candy Harry
35: The Sun
36: Two Drowned Rats
37: Newshound
38: Spaghetti Western
39: The Giant
Photo Insert Two
40: How Not to Run a Public Library
41: And Then What?
42: Blue Ribbon
PART FIVE / The King of Wall Street
43: Pharaoh
44: Rose
45: Call the Tow Truck
46: Rubicon
47: White Nights
48: Thumb-Sucking, and Its Hollow-Cheeked Result
Photo Insert Three
49: The Angry Gods
50: The Lottery
51: To Hell with the Bear
52: Chickenfeed
PART SIX / Claim Checks
53: The Genie
54: Semicolon
55: The Last Kay Party
Photo Insert Four
56: By the Rich, for the Rich
57: Oracle
58: Buffetted
59: Winter
60: Frozen Coke
61: The Seventh Fire
62: Claim Checks
Afterword
Notes
A Personal Note About Research
Photo Credits and Permissions
Acknowledgments
Copyright
To David
It is the winter of Warren’s ninth year. Outside in the yard, he and his little sister, Bertie, are playing in the snow.
Warren is catching snowflakes. One at a time at first. Then he is scooping them up by handfuls. He starts to pack them into a ball. As the snowball grows bigger, he places it on the ground. Slowly it begins to roll. He gives it a push, and it picks up more snow. He pushes the snowball across the lawn, piling snow on snow. Soon he reaches the edge of the yard. After a moment of hesitation, he heads off, rolling the snowball through the neighborhood.
And from there, Warren continues onward, casting his eye on a whole world full of snow.
PART ONE
The Bubble
1
The Less Flattering Version
Omaha • June 2003
Warren Buffett rocks back in his chair, long legs crossed at the knee behind his father Howard’s plain wooden desk. His expensive Zegna suit jacket bunches around his shoulders like an untailored version bought off the rack. The jacket stays on all day, every day, no matter how casually the other fifteen employees at Berkshire Hathaway headquarters are dressed. His predictable white shirt sits low on the neck, its undersize collar bulging away from his tie, looking left over from his days as a young businessman, as if he had forgotten to check his neck size for the last forty years.
His hands lace behind his head through strands of whitening hair. One particularly large and messy finger-combed chunk takes off over his skull like a ski jump, lofting upward at the knoll of his right ear. His shaggy right eyebrow wanders toward it above the tortoiseshell glasses. At various times this eyebrow gives him a skeptical, knowing, or beguiling look. Right now he wears a subtle smile, which lends the wayward eyebrow a captivating air. Nonetheless, his pale-blue eyes are focused and intent.
He sits surrounded by icons and mementos of fifty years. In the hallways outside his office, Nebraska Cornhuskers football photographs, his paycheck from an appearance on a soap opera, the offer letter (never accepted) to buy a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management, and Coca-Cola memorabilia everywhere. On the coffee table inside the office, a classic Coca-Cola bottle. A baseball glove encased in Lucite. Over the sofa, a certificate that he completed Dale Carnegie’s public-speaking course