The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [16]
In his spare time, he pored over reports from the hundreds of companies he hadn’t bought yet. Partly out of interest, and partly just in case.
If some dignitary made the pilgrimage to Omaha to meet him, he got in his steel-blue Lincoln Town Car and drove the 1.5 miles through downtown and out to the airport to pick him or her up personally. People were startled and charmed by the unaffected gesture, although he soon scraped their nerves raw by barely noticing stop signs, traffic lights, or other cars, weaving around the road while talking animatedly. He rationalized his distractedness by saying that he drove so slowly that, if he had an accident, the damage would be light.8
He always gave a tour of his office, showing off his totems, the memorabilia that told the story of his business life. Then he sat, leaning forward in a chair, hands clasped and eyebrows raised sympathetically as he listened to the visitor’s questions and requests. To each of them Buffett offered off-the-cuff wit, quick decisions on business proposals, and warm advice. As they left, he might surprise a famous politician or the CEO of some huge company by dropping in for lunch at McDonald’s before ferrying him back to the airport.
In between the reading, the research, and the occasional meetings, the phone rang all day long. First-time callers punching in Buffett’s number were shocked to hear a hearty “Hello!” and often stumbled in confusion when they realized that he answered his own phone. His secretary, the amiable Debbie Bosanek, trotted in and out of his office with messages from the overflow calls. On his credenza, another phone rang from time to time. He took these calls instantly, for they were from his trader. “Yello…mmm hmm…yep…how much…mmm hmm…go ahead,” he would say, and hang up. Then he turned back to the other calls, or to his reading or CNBC, before leaving promptly at five-thirty p.m. for home.
The woman waiting for him there was not his wife. He was perfectly open about Astrid Menks, with whom he had lived in an unusual triangular arrangement since 1978. Susie Buffett approved of, and in fact had arranged the relationship; yet he and Susie both made a great point of saying how very married they were, their routine as a couple as scheduled and orchestrated as everything else in Buffett’s life. All the while, he offered no more explanation in public than “If you knew everybody well, you’d understand it quite well.”9 While this was true in its way, it did not help the curious, since almost nobody knew both Susie and Astrid well, or, for that matter, Buffett himself. He kept these relationships separate, as he kept many of his relationships separate. By all appearances, however, Astrid and Susie were friends.
Most nights, Buffett ate dinner—something like a hamburger or pork chop—at home with Astrid. After a couple of hours he turned his attention to his nightly bridge game on the Internet, to which he devoted about twelve hours a week. While he tapped away, glued to the screen with the background noise of the TV, Astrid mostly left him to his game, except when occasionally he said, “Astrid, get me a Coke!” Afterward, he usually talked to Sharon Osberg, his bridge partner and a close confidante, for a while on the phone as Astrid puttered around the house until ten, when Buffett had his nightly conference call with Ajit Jain, who ran his reinsurance business. Meanwhile, Astrid went to the market and picked up the early edition of the next day’s newspaper. While he read it, she went to bed. And that, it seemed, was the simple, ordinary life of a megabillionaire.
4
Warren, What’s Wrong?
Omaha and Atlanta • August–December 1999
Nearly all of Buffett’s $30 billion plus—ninety-nine percent—was invested in the stock of Berkshire Hathaway. He had spoken at Sun Valley about how the market’s weighing machine was more important than its voting machine. But it was the voting machine’s opinion of his stock price that set the altitude