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safe-deposit boxes with him everywhere and would try to rent you a safe-deposit box at a cocktail party. Mind you, this is the biggest bank in the second-largest city in Illinois at the time. He set every salary and paid every employee in cash, so the head of the trust department did not know how much his own secretaries made. So I went out there, and I named a number that turned out to be about a million dollars less than the other guy. And Gene, who owned a quarter of the stock, called up his biggest shareholder, who owned more than half the stock, and said, ‘This young guy from Omaha’s come here and offered this. I’m tired of those guys at XYZ Company. If you want to sell to them, then you come run this bank, because I won’t.’”

Sure enough, Abegg accepted his offer. And doing business with him cinched Buffett’s instinct that strong-willed and ethical entrepreneurs often cared more about how they and the companies they had built were going to be treated by the new owners than about grabbing the last nickel in a sale.

The Illinois National Bank, which Buffett soon came to refer to by its colloquial name of Rockford Bank, had been chartered in the days before the U.S. Treasury assumed the exclusive right to coin money. Buffett was fascinated to discover that it still issued its own currency. The ten-dollar bills featured Abegg’s picture. Buffett, whose net worth was now more than $26 million, could have bought almost anything he wanted, but not this. Gene Abegg had done him one better. He and the United States Treasury had the privilege of issuing their own currency, but not the Buffett Partnership or Berkshire Hathaway.3 The idea of legal tender with your own picture on it captivated him. He began carrying a Rockford bill in his wallet.

Heretofore, Buffett had not wanted his picture on a bill or anywhere else. He had more or less shunned the spotlight while managing the partnership. True, a few more stories and photographs of his family had found their way into the local paper than might be expected of someone who wanted privacy.4 Nevertheless, except for his letters to the partners, he had gone through the sixties with his lips sealed—he didn’t want anyone coattailing him. He didn’t talk about how he invested and he didn’t broadcast his results, in contrast to the flash and razzle-dazzle shown by other money managers of the era, whose self-promotion propelled them to nearly instant fame.

Even when the opportunity to promote himself arrived on his doorstep, he hadn’t used it. A few years earlier, John Loomis, a securities salesman, visited Buffett at Kiewit Plaza. Loomis’s wife, Carol, wrote the investing column for Fortune magazine. She had once interviewed a money manager named Bill Ruane, who told her that the smartest investor in the United States lived in Omaha. Some time later, her husband arrived at the pale monolith of Kiewit Plaza and made his way upstairs to the 227½-square-foot space that looked nothing like the office of one of the richest men in town.

Buffett took him over to the restaurant at the Blackstone Hotel across the street, where he downed a strawberry malt and told Loomis what he did. Loomis talked about his wife’s job as a journalist, and Buffett found that interesting. He said that if he had not become a money manager, he would have pursued journalism as a career.5

Warren and Susie met with the Loomises when they were in New York not long after. “They got us a special little room someplace where we had lunch,” Buffett says. The well-connected young money manager from Omaha with the stellar track record and the ambitious reporter for Fortune found they shared many attributes: a zeal for unmasking the flimflam of fat cats, a magpie obsession with minutiae, and a streak of competitiveness as long as the interstate from New York to Omaha. Carol Loomis was a tall, athletic-looking, no-nonsense woman with short brown hair who tolerated shoddy journalism about as well as Buffett tolerated losing money, and she was a punctilious editor. They began to correspond and she ushered him into the world of