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Many Salomon employees and ex-employees, of course, were less impressed with Buffett than was the rest of the world. He had reined in their freewheeling culture, ruined their bonus day; he disdained their business and they knew it. Plenty of employees had unhappy stories to tell. Soon enough, the contrast between Buffett’s aw-shucks image and his coldly rational side hit the radar screen of the national press. How to explain the dichotomy between Buffett figuratively sitting on a front porch with a glass of lemonade, telling folksy stories and teaching through homilies, and his long history of sophisticated business feats? What was he doing as interim chairman of an investment bank while talking and writing about Wall Street as a gang of con men, sharpies, and cheats?

What he was doing was trying to align the way people were paid at Salomon with the interests of shareholders, but his concern about compensation was just one aspect of his fundamental objection to a business in which almost every department had some sort of inherent conflict of interest with its customers. And without decimating Salomon by jettisoning everything but proprietary trading, he could not do much about that. But even by 1991, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic1 took note of his straddling of two worlds, and both ran stories pointing out the disparities between them. The mismatch between Buffett’s representation of himself as a middle-class Midwesterner who had woken up in Oz and the elephant-bumping in which he routinely engaged with his collection of jumbo-dumbo celebrity friends only heightened the press’s eagerness to do some debunking. The Wall Street Journal story ran a sidebar to its article, “Buffett’s Circle Includes the Moneyed and Powerful,” namedropping people like Walter Annenberg.2 Several of those mentioned in the story later said they were misquoted. Among them were Tom Murphy and a new friend, Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft Corporation, who had gotten into a casual discussion with Murphy about how he was being “ripped off,” as Charlie Munger put it, by the cost of producing television commercials. This conversation, which took place at a Buffett Group meeting, was portrayed by the Journal as musing over where the price of advertising was headed and what advertising rates should be, which might fall into a “gray area of antitrust.”3 Buffett and his friends sparred with the Journal’s editors with little effect. Meanwhile, Gates—who might have gotten annoyed at finding himself tangled in this public-relations mess involving antitrust issues less than a year after the Federal Trade Commission had launched a probe into possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM in the PC software marketplace—instead wrote Buffett an earnest letter apologizing for having embarrassed him.4 At the time, Gates had known Buffett for less than five months.

The two had met that summer over the Fourth of July holiday, when Kay Graham and her Washington Post editorial-page editor and friend Meg Greenfield had dragged Buffett to Greenfield’s house on Bainbridge Island for a long holiday weekend. To Buffett, a weekend on an island a half-hour ferry ride from Seattle that could be escaped only by boat, seaplane, or hitching a ride over the bridge by car was an “anything for Kay” event. Greenfield had also recruited him for an all-day visit at the nearby four-house compound on the Hood Canal that Bill Gates had built for his family. Gates, twenty-five years Buffett’s junior, was appealing to Buffett mainly because he was known to be brilliant and because the two of them were neck-and-neck in the Forbes race. But computers looked like Brussels sprouts to Buffett; no, he did not want to try them this once. Greenfield, however, had assured him that he would like Gates’s parents, Bill Sr. and Mary, and that other interesting people would be there. With some reluctance, Buffett had agreed to go.

Kay and Warren drove down the dirt-and-gravel road to Meg’s glass-walled contemporary house, where