The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [15]
Munger spent much of his time working on four causes. When he chose, he could pitch in with an almost stunning generosity. However, lacking a soft spot for the people of what he called “Dregsville,” his charity took the form of a Darwinian quest to boost the brightest. Good Samaritan Hospital, the Harvard-Westlake School, the Huntington Library, and the Stanford Law School were the beneficiaries. These organizations knew that Munger’s money and effort would be accompanied by much lecturing and insistence that everyone do things Charlie’s way. He would gladly pay for dormitories at Stanford Law School, as long as Stanford made each room exactly so many feet wide, with a window exactly here and the bedroom so many feet from the kitchen, and provided that the university locate the parking garage where he insisted. He embodied old-fashioned noblesse oblige, with all sorts of irritating strings attached to the money for the recipients’ own good, because he knew best.
Even with all this overseeing of others’ activities, Munger often left for the day in time to play a little golf with his cronies at the Los Angeles Country Club. Then he joined his wife, Nancy, for dinner, sometimes at the Pasadena house he’d designed himself or, more likely, with a longtime group of close-knit friends, once again either at the California Club or the L.A. Country Club. He concluded his day by burying his nose in a book. He vacationed regularly with his eight children and stepchildren and assorted grandchildren, usually at his cabin on Minnesota’s Star Island, where, like his father, he was an avid fisherman. He hosted dozens of people on his enormous catamaran, the Channel Cat (described as a “floating restaurant” by one friend, and used mainly to entertain). In short, despite his idiosyncrasies, Munger was a straightforward family man who liked his friends, his clubs, and his charities.
Buffett liked his friends and his clubs, but had little to do with charities. His life was even simpler than Munger’s, despite a personality that was far more complex. He spent the vast majority of his time in Omaha, but his schedule revolved around a series of board meetings and trips to visit friends, orchestrated with an unhurried regularity, like the phases of the moon. On the days he was in town, he drove 1.5 miles from the house he’d inhabited for four decades to the office at Kiewit Plaza that he’d occupied for almost as long, where he sat down behind his father’s desk by eight-thirty a.m. There, he turned on the television to CNBC with the sound muted before picking up his pile of newspapers, keeping half an eye on the screen while plowing through a pile of publications on his desk: American Banker, Editor & Publisher, Broadcasting, Beverage Digest, Furniture Today, A.M. Best’s Property-Casualty Review, the New Yorker, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Observer, and newsletters from writers he admired on the stock and bond market.
After that he digested the monthly, weekly, and daily reports faxed, mailed, and e-mailed by the businesses that Berkshire owned, a list that grew longer year by year, telling him how many auto policies GEICO had sold last week and how many claims it had paid; how many pounds of See’s Candies had sold yesterday; how many prison-guard uniforms had been ordered from Fechheimers; how many jet time-shares NetJets was selling in Europe and the United States; and all the rest—awnings, battery chargers, kilowatt hours, air compressors, engagement rings, leased trucks, encyclopedias, pilot training, home furnishings, cardiopulmonary equipment, pig stalls, boat loans, real estate listings, ice cream sundaes, winches and windlasses, cubic feet of gas, sump pumps, vacuum cleaners, newspaper advertising, egg counters, knives, furniture rentals, nurses’ shoes, electromechanical components.