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The meetings carried on like this for years, with only a sprinkling of people showing up to ask questions, even after the meetings moved to Nebraska and took place in the National Indemnity cafeteria. Buffett still enjoyed them, despite the sparse attendance. As recently as 1981, only twenty-two people attended. Jack Ringwalt actually had to recruit employees to stand in back of the National Indemnity cafeteria so as not to embarrass his boss with an empty room. When the meeting was adjourned after fifteen minutes of routine legalizing and half a dozen perfunctory questions, the stenographer whom Conrad Taff had flown in to take notes for him had written nothing down. She looked frantically at Verne McKenzie, who just shrugged.36

Then in July 1983, coincident with the Blue Chip merger, a little crowd of people suddenly showed up at the cafeteria to hear Buffett talk. He answered as many questions as they asked in his plain-spoken, unpretentious style: He was teaching, and he came across as democratic, Midwestern, and refreshing, just as he did in his letters to the shareholders.

Buffett spoke in metaphors the audience understood, using the emperor’s new clothes and the bird in the hand versus the two in the bush. He told plain-spoken truths that other businessmen would not acknowledge, and routinely burst the bubble of corporate double-speak. He developed a memorable way of fabulizing life and businesses into instructive tales that rang familiar—Rose Blumkin as the Cinderella of Berkshire Hathaway, or Ajit Jain as Buffett’s Rumpelstiltskin, who ran his reinsurance division by spinning straw into gold. His style was so engaging and his meaning so illuminating that word began to spread. The way he expressed himself made people see old problems in new ways. The meetings took on a quality associated with almost everything that Buffett touched. They began to snowball.

In 1986, Buffett moved the meeting to the Witherspoon Auditorium of the Joslyn Art Museum. Four hundred people came, then five hundred the next year. Many of them worshipped Buffett, who had made them rich. In between questions, some people read poems of praise from the balcony.37

Buffett’s anomalous success, and the fame it had brought him, was putting him on the road to becoming a brand just as surely as Skippy peanut butter. Inevitably, therefore, he became the target of a group of finance professors who were at that very moment attempting to prove that someone like Buffett was a mere accident who should not be paid attention, much less worshipped.

These academics had started by positing the reasonable but not necessarily obvious truth that if a whole lot of people were trying to be better than average, they would become the average. Paul Samuelson, an MIT economist, revived and circulated the 1900 work of Louis Bachelier, who observed that the market is made up of speculators who cohere into a whole that operates according to a “random walk.”38 A professor from the University of Chicago, Eugene Fama, took Bachelier’s work and tested it empirically in the modern-day market, which he described as “efficient.” The scrabbling efforts of legions of investors to beat the market made those very efforts futile, he said. Yet an army of professionals had sprung up who charged everything from modest fees to the soon-to-be-legendary hedge-fund cut of “two-and-twenty”(two percent of assets and twenty percent of returns) for the privilege of managing an investor’s money and trying to predict the future behavior of stocks. Stockbrokers raked their cut from all the individuals who were encouraged by TV shows and magazines to pick the next hot stock and compete with the pros. Every year, the sum of all these people’s labors added up to exactly what the market did (less the fees).

Charles Ellis, a consultant to professional money managers, blew the whistle on the market’s pickpockets in 1975 in “Winning the Loser’s Game,” an article that showed that professional money managers failed to beat the market ninety percent of the time.39