• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“We’re just passing along the message. $4½ bid.”

More calls would go back and forth until a week later, Browne came back to Buffett: “Okay. $4½ bid,” he’d say.

“Sorry,” Buffett would say, and drop it another eighth. “$4⅜.”

Thus he Buffetted the price ever lower. And rarely—almost never—did he want a stock badly enough to raise his bid.30

He placed his first order for Berkshire Hathaway through Tweedy on December 12, 1962, for two thousand shares at $7.50 a share, paying the broker a $20 commission.31 He told Tweedy to keep buying.

Cowin got the scuttlebutt on Berkshire from board member Stanley Rubin, Berkshire’s top salesman, who happened to be a friend of Otis Stanton, another member of the board. Otis Stanton felt his brother was out of touch. Protected by his secretaries in his ivory tower, Seabury was doing more and more drinking as the clash between his lofty vision and reality worsened.32 Otis was by now sharply at odds with Seabury.33 He felt his brother should have taken a strike rather than giving in to demands for higher wages.34 He also disapproved of Seabury’s choice of a successor, his son, Jack, who was a pleasant enough young man but not up to the job—according to Otis. Otis had his own idea about who should succeed Seabury—Ken Chace, the vice president of manufacturing.

Seabury Stanton responded to Buffett’s purchases as though a takeover threat was imminent, and made several tender offers for the stock. This was exactly what Buffett wanted, for his purchases were predicated on the theory that, eventually, Seabury would buy him out. He wanted the Berkshire stock not to keep it but to sell it. Nevertheless, in every trade there is a buyer and a seller. Seabury Stanton had so far withstood the forces of cheap foreign fabric and Hurricane Carol. Instead of Seabury getting Buffetted, there was a chance that Buffett could get Seaburied.

Eventually, Warren drove up to New Bedford to see the place for himself. For once, he was not just dropping in. Miss Tabor, who was fiercely loyal to Seabury, decided which callers would be allowed through the glass doors and up the narrow stairs to Stanton’s penthouse office. When she grimly ushered Warren into Stanton’s palatially furnished, ballroom-size wood-paneled lair, he saw that there was no place anywhere near Stanton’s desk to sit. This, clearly, was a man used to summoning people to stand before him while he sat behind his desk and directed them what to do.

The two men seated themselves at the uncomfortable rectangular glass conference table in a corner, and Buffett asked where Stanton stood on the next tender offer. Stanton looked at him through the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the tip of his nose. “He was reasonably cordial. But then he said, ‘We’ll probably have a tender one of these days, and what price would you sell at, Mr. Buffett?’ or words to that effect. The stock at the time was selling at something like $9 or $10 a share.

“I said I’d sell at $11.50 a share on a tender offer, if they had one. And he said, ‘Well, will you promise me that if we have a tender offer you’ll tender?’

“I said, ‘Well, you know, if it’s in the reasonably near future, but not if it’s twenty years from now.’ But I said, ‘Fine.’

“So now I was frozen. I felt that I couldn’t buy any more stock because I knew too much about what he might do. So I went home, and not too long after, a letter comes from the Old Colony Trust Company, which was part of First National of Boston, offering $11⅜ per share to anyone who would tender their Berkshire.” That was 12½ cents less per share than agreed.

Buffett was furious. “It really burned me up. You know, this guy was trying to chisel an eighth of a point from having, in effect, shaken my hand saying this was the deal.”

Warren was used to doing the Buffetting, and now Stanton had tried to chisel him. He sent Dan Cowin to New Bedford to try to reason with Stanton not to renege on the deal. The two men argued, and Stanton denied that he had made a deal with Buffett; he told Cowin that it was his company and he would do as