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was a serious transgression in the Buffett family, and Doris’s timing was terrible. The Buffetts were still trying to recover from Billy Rogers’s fatal overdose just seven months before, another event that had publicly bared the problems beneath the family’s wholesome surface. Warren may have known—on some level—that he was rationalizing. Certainly he feared Doris’s ire; when she felt threatened—like Kay Graham—Doris defended herself as if cornered. Warren, of all people, genuinely understood his sister—but he could not tolerate shrill behavior from anyone, not even her. So he retreated. He stopped calling, and nobody else in the family contacted Doris. She felt as though the family had cut her off. Frightened at being abandoned and deeply wounded, Doris browbeat her mother for money and loans to prevent her from losing her home.13 Ironically, the Federal Reserve had lowered interest rates, companies were buying their own stocks, and the market was recovering quickly from the debacle, leaving only victims like Doris behind in its wake. In a sort of panic, she married Al Bryant, the lawyer who was helping her with her legal difficulties.

But behind the scenes, Warren was arranging to advance his sister $10,000 a month from the trust left by Howard’s will. “That was more money than I have ever spent in my whole life,” she says. The tension deescalated; they were able to speak. She was almost prostrate with gratitude—until she realized that this was her own money, which she was simply being paid early. At the time, her share of the trust, having grown from a little over 2,000 shares of Berkshire that were worth $30,000 in 1964, was valued at about $10 million. The trust was not structured to pay out until Leila died, when Doris and Bertie would receive the money in four installments. As a further olive branch, however, her brother set up the Sherwood Foundation, which paid out $500,000 a year in charitable gifts. Doris, Warren’s children, and Astrid could each allocate $100,000 to any causes they chose. The annual income produced was as if her brother had put around $7 million into a trust for the five of them. Doris’s share, therefore, was almost as much as if Warren had given her the money after all, but in a different form.

Of course, it was not in a form she could use to pay her debts or save her house—Warren never gave money outright, only in an earmarked manner that he controlled. Still, as the storm subsided, Doris regained perspective. She was grateful that he had gotten over his embarrassment and had helped her, in his own way. She was acutely aware that without him she would have had nothing in the first place. As she scraped together the money to pay her debts, their relationship gradually returned to normal, and the shrine stayed in place on her wall.

The other victim of the crash that Buffett had to deal with was Salomon. Only three months after Berkshire’s investment, he and Munger attended their first board meeting. The topic of the day was the slump in trading and merger business at Salomon and the $75 million that Black Monday had cost the firm.14 Salomon faced the cleanup from Black Monday weakened by the fact that, only days before the crash, Gutfreund, his moon-shaped face impassive, had head-chopped even highly valued longtime employees, laid off eight hundred people, and discontinued marginally profitable businesses such as commercial paper trading (a backwater of the bond business) so abruptly that the disruption hurt relationships with some important clients almost beyond repair.15 These and the losses from Black Monday were going to gouge a deep hole in the shareholders’ pockets that year. And with that, Salomon’s stock fell into the tank.

The shareholders were suffering, yet the compensation committee—which Buffett had joined at the request of its chairman, Bob Zeller—began to discuss lowering the price at which the employees’ stock options could be exercised.

These options were rights to buy stock at a specified price in the future. If Salomon had been See’s Candies, it would be as if Buffett