The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [309]
Buffett could handle people like McNamara through diplomacy; a greater—and unanticipated—problem was the physical danger he found himself in because of his fame. Two men arrived at Kiewit Plaza, one waving a chrome-plated replica of a .45, intending to kidnap Buffett and hold him for $100,000 ransom, which the kidnapper later explained would be a “loan” to buy a ranch.16 The security guards and police handled it, and Buffett, unharmed, started jokingly referring to the man as “Billy Bob” to Gladys. He would not hear of hiring a bodyguard, for that would restrict his cherished privacy and freedom, but he did have a security camera installed, along with a three-hundred-pound security door to shield the office.17
Strangers called often now, insistent, wanting to speak with him. They’d only take a minute, nobody else could help them, they knew he’d be interested in what they had to say. Gladys told them in crisp tones to write a letter spelling out their requests.18 Buffett started getting letters asking for Berkshire stock—in exchange for advice to take hawthorn herbal remedies—or requesting funding to create an unspecified new type of ice cream. People wrote to say: Mr. Buffett, I am tired of living an average life. I have a burning desire to be rich. You have money, give me some.19 And a lot of letters said, I’ve gotten in over my head with credit cards or gambling debt.20
Buffett the collector kept so many of the letters that they began to fill up his files. Many of them confirmed the way he thought of himself, as a role model, as a teacher. Occasionally, something touched him and struck him as real. If he thought it would do some good and he had time, he wrote a debtor or gambler back with firm but kind insistence that they take responsibility for their problems. As if they were his kids, he suggested they buy time to bail themselves out by telling their creditors how broke they were and negotiating easier payment terms. He always added a little soliloquy about the perils of too much debt—especially debt from credit cards, the junk bonds of the personal-finance world.
His own kids had received little training about how to handle large sums of money, but one thing they had learned was the peril of debt—a fortunate lesson, because their father was almost as inflexible about requests for money from them as he was from strangers. He was still willing, however, to make financial deals with family members to manage their weight.
With her shoulder-length brown bob and heart-shaped face, the thirty-something Susie Jr. could pass for twenty-five, but she struggled with a few extra pounds. Her father made a deal in which, for losing a certain amount of weight, she could shop for clothes for a month, no limit. The only catch was that she had to pay him back if she regained the weight in a year. This deal was better than the proverbial win/win: It was also a no-risk deal in which Buffett won either way. He was out the money only if Susie Jr. did as he wanted and kept the weight off. She got the clothes. So Susie Jr. dieted, and when she got down to the goal weight, Big Susie mailed credit cards to her daughter with a note—“Have fun!”
Susie Jr. dared not spend a dime at first, frightened by the thought of asking her father to pay the bills. Bit by bit she worked herself up, until finally she shopped in the blind daze induced by having unlimited money for the first time in her life, tossing the receipts unread each day on the dining-room table, too afraid to add the total. “Oh, my God!” said her husband, Allen, each night as he returned home to his wife’s mounting pile of sales slips. After thirty days, she added them