The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [320]
“Walter,” Buffett asked, “how do you justify buying a private airplane?” Buffett knew that Kiewit had a fleet of private jets because it was always having to ferry its employees to remote construction sites.
“Warren,” said Scott, “you don’t justify it. You rationalize it.”
Two days later, Buffett called back. “Walter, I’ve rationalized it,” he said. “Now, how do you hire a pilot and maintain a plane?”
Scott offered to let Buffett piggyback the maintenance of his proposed new jet on Kiewit’s fleet, and Buffett went off and sheepishly bought a used Falcon 20—the same type of plane that Kiewit employees flew—as Berkshire’s corporate jet.58 It gave him an extraordinary degree of privacy, as well as control over his travel schedule—privacy and control over his time ranking in the top handful of things that Buffett cared most about on earth.
Of course, buying a private jet conflicted with another of the things he cared most about: not wasting money. Buffett had never lived down an incident in an airport in which Kay Graham had asked him for a dime to make a phone call. He pulled out the only coin he had, a quarter, started to bolt off to get change, but Graham had stopped him by teasing him into letting her waste fifteen cents. So, for Buffett, it was like leaping in one bound over Mount Kilimanjaro to go from justifying twenty-five cents for a phone call to rationalizing two pilots and an entire airplane to carry him around like a pharaoh on a litter. But he was doing a fair amount of rationalizing this year, having just rationalized giving up $185 million in tax avoidance as well.
Still, it bothered him—the jet so plainly contradicted his upbringing and self-image. His tortured rationale to his former roommate from Penn, Clyde Reighard, explained with great earnestness and obvious embarrassment, was that the plane was going to save him money by getting him around faster.59 Next he started to make fun of himself to the shareholders, saying, “I work cheap and travel expensive.”
The plane ushered in a new phase of his life. Buffett clung tenaciously to his corn belt—even while wearing black tie—yet fraternized ever more often with hoity-toity sosoity, as CEO of the Frozen Corporation. In 1987, Ambassador Walter Annenberg and his wife, Leonore, invited Warren and Susie out to Palm Springs for a weekend with their friends Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Buffett had dined at the White House and already knew both the Reagans from visiting Kay Graham’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, but he had never spent a whole weekend with a sitting president.
“It was kind of like an elaborate minuet or something. Sunnylands was designed to be sort of a court for Walter. You had two people living there and fifty-something servants. You had a billion dollars’ worth of art on the walls, and I’m the only guy that was ever there that didn’t ooh and aah over the art. I’d just as soon have a bunch of old Playboy covers on the walls.” (Susie, however, might not have enjoyed herself quite as much.)
“They put us in the Blue Room. The bedspreads, the covers on the books were all blue. Everything was blue. The jelly beans were blue. Every guest room had two maids, so they could serve us breakfast in bed at the same time, and the trays would be placed down at the exact same time and they would lift the covers at the exact same time.
“When we would walk out in the evening dressed for dinner, there would be one maid on each side of the door. And Susie’s maid would say, ‘Madame looks beautiful tonight.’ And then my maid would look at me and just sort of gurgle. She’d had a week to prepare for me and think of what to say, and she can’t come up with anything.
“Walter had his own private nine-hole golf course at Sunnylands. He had his own driving range with ten tees lined up and all these golf balls piled in perfect little neat pyramids. And there wasn’t anybody there. The course was immaculate.