The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [379]
Now everybody wanted to talk to Gates, who could explain the new digital world and what it meant to them. “The next thing we knew, we were going on the boat that afternoon,” says Gates. “And Kay was making sure that I didn’t just talk to Warren.” That was fortunate, because Buffett—who liked to glue himself to certain people—would have liked to become Bill Gates’s Siamese twin. They headed out on Walter and Suzanne Scott’s enormous boat, the Ice Bear. Graham introduced Gates to Tisch and Murphy and Keough and the rest.17 In half a day, he and Melinda had become de facto members of the Buffett Group. A bunch of people dropped in and out of a come-and-go discussion of many things, during which Gates grumbled to Murphy about the high cost of his television advertising. A month later the Wall Street Journal story had appeared, portraying Buffett as a hypocrite rather than the complex personality he was, and making all of them regret—not the conversation about ad prices, but having responded after the meeting to questions from a reporter who didn’t have a working tape recorder in his hand.
By 1993, thanks partly to the salvation of Salomon, Berkshire stock had nearly doubled. By the time Warren was starting to Buffett his way through the arbitration with John Gutfreund, it burst through $18,000 a share. Buffett was now worth $8.5 billion, and Susie’s stock was worth $700 million. The original partners now had $6 million for every $1,000 they’d invested in 1957. Buffett was now the richest man in the United States.
Over the holidays, he and Carol Loomis turned to the annual ritual of writing and editing his chairman’s letter, this time with the awareness of a much larger national—even international—audience. In May 1994, the same month that Gutfreund’s arbitrators awarded him zero, Buffett held his annual shareholder meeting; more than 2,700 people arrived at the Orpheum Theater. Buffett told See’s, the shoe companies, and World Book encyclopedia, which the company also owned, to set up booths in the lobby. See’s sold eight hundred pounds of candy, and more than five hundred pairs of shoes walked out the door.18 World Book sold well, too, although Buffett did not know that it, like Kodak, would soon be toasted by the Internet. Delighted with his shareholders’ purchases, Buffett drove over to Borsheim’s and made an appearance, then showed up at the Furniture Mart. “He goes out to where we have the mattresses displayed,” said Louie Blumkin, “and he’s selling, man.”19 Buffett started to think harder about the idea of hawking products at the shareholder meetings. He vowed to move the meeting to the Holiday Inn, which had more space for sales booths. And next year, he decided, he would also sell Ginsu knives.20
His rising fame swept most of the family along with it. Now that Buffett was worth more than $8 billion, his charitable foundation would be one of the five largest in the world, and his and Susie’s decision to leave almost all of their money to it meant that it would be Berkshire’s largest shareholder after he died. Reflecting that, he had recently added Susie, who was president of the Buffett Foundation but knew nothing about business, to the Berkshire Hathaway board. The foundation had been giving away about $3.5 million a year, which had doubled by 1994—still small by the standards of families of similar wealth. Its future riches, however, were well-known. The Buffett Foundation and its president were suddenly in the public eye.
When Susie had moved to San Francisco and made the decision to stay married to Warren while going her own way, she envisioned being able to keep the two halves of her life separate, quiet, and in balance. Never a thinker, she was caught by surprise when her husband became an icon of the business world, carrying her along with him. On the one