The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [290]
At this point, the Buffett Foundation had a token $725,000 and gave away less than $40,000 a year, nearly all to education.26 Susie ran the Buffett Foundation, which reflected their joint philosophy that money should go back to society. If she’d had access to them, Susie would have given away large amounts quickly. But Buffett was in no rush. He felt that by allowing the money to compound over time, there would be more to give away in the end—after he was gone. Certainly by 1983 he had a good argument in favor of this idea. Between 1978 and the end of 1983, the Buffetts’ net worth had increased by a stunning amount, from $89 million to $680 million.
As he became richer, requests for money from friends, strangers, and charities poured in to Kiewit Plaza. Some were heartfelt pleas from the genuinely needy. Other people seemed to feel entitled to his money. The United Way, universities, cancer, churches, heart disease, the homeless, the environment, the local zoo, the symphony, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross—all deserving causes, but the answer was the same: If I did it for you, I would have to do it for everybody. Some of his friends agreed with him, while others were perplexed that a man so generous with his time, advice, and wisdom was such a tightwad with his cash. It’s not like it would kill him to peel off a few bucks, they said. Why didn’t he find the joy in giving?
But as long as Buffett was still amassing the snowball, promising to give it all away after he died was like the “jam tomorrow” of Alice in Wonderland’s White Queen. “After he died” was the same as never; another hedge against mortality, one of Buffett’s great preoccupations. The “White Queen” form of denial was self-reinforcing in a peculiar way. By now, the Buffetts had at least nine friends or relatives who had, or whose family members had, attempted or committed suicide. Most recently, one of his friends’ sons had driven his car off a cliff on Christmas Eve. Then, Rick Guerin’s wife, Ann, had shot and killed herself a few days before their son’s eighth birthday. By now, Buffett had a queasy preoccupation with suicide that was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. Yet he himself was determined to live as long as possible—and to make money until the very end.
As his wealth grew, Buffett’s often articulated and unwavering determination to keep making money at a furious rate while withholding it from his family and his foundation finally sparked a rebellion among his friends. Rick Guerin had written to Joe Rosenfield about the possibility of Buffett becoming the world’s richest man: “What will Warren do when he becomes No. 1 sled dog and sees that there’s more to the world than hair and a small target? (He thinks it’s a bull’s-eye, but we know better.)”27
When the Buffett Group met in Lyford Cay, Bahamas, between the snorkeling and deep-sea fishing George Gillespie sparked a hot debate by organizing a talk on “The Children (and Charity) Will Have to Wait.” Years earlier Buffett had said he gave his kids a few thousand dollars for Christmas each year and told them to expect half a million dollars when he died.28 That, he thought, was “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”29 This phrase would become one of his mantras, repeated over the years. “Warren, that’s wrong,” said Larry Tisch, one of his former partners. “If they aren’t spoiled by age twelve, they won’t be spoiled.”30 Kay Graham, tears streaming down