The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [383]
Peter was respected but not famous, a working musician but not a star. In the music world, the Buffett name meant nothing. His father was proud of his son’s movie scoring and other work. But artistry divorced from fame or commercial success flew past Warren just the way his investing and business passion flew past Peter; their worlds did not connect. Yet, oddly, Warren and Peter were the most alike; both shared a passionate devotion to a vocation for which they had been destined from early childhood; both got wrapped up so obsessively in their work that they expected their wives to become their conduit to the outside world.
Buffett also now had, in effect, a third son—Bill Gates.
At first it was what Gates calls “a tiny bit of ‘Warren’s the adult and I’m the child.’” Gradually this evolved into “Hey, we’re both in this learning at the same time.”30 Munger often attributed much of Buffett’s success to the fact that he was a “learning machine.” Although he was not going to learn to code software, and Gates wasn’t going to learn to cite the statistics of every business for the last seventy years, their shared intellect, interests, and way of thinking gave them considerable common ground. They shared the same intensity. Buffett taught Gates about investing and acted as the sounding board for Gates’s ruminations about his business. It was the way Buffett had learned to think in models that impressed Gates most. Buffett was as eager to share his thoughts about what makes a great business with Gates as Gates was eager to hear them.
If Buffett could have found more great businesses, he would have bought them all. He never stopped looking for them. The town where the Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville lived was getting crowded, however. Wall Street as a whole had been overrun; there were fewer and fewer odd pockets of overlooked opportunity. Buffett had carved out more time and created more balance in his life; he no longer wandered off to read American Banker during dinner parties, and he genuinely enjoyed socializing. While his focus on business never lessened, as the nineties progressed, the deals became larger—but more sporadic. Meanwhile, a new interest took hold. It would not reduce his zeal for Berkshire, but it would alter his social priorities, his travel itineraries, and even his friendships.
What Buffett now wanted to do in his spare time was to play bridge. He had been playing a casual social game for nearly fifty years, and while in New York to handle Salomon, he had started playing a more serious and competitive game. One day in 1993, he was playing in a simultaneous international bridge tournament with George Gillespie and met Sharon Osberg, who was partnered with Carol Loomis.
Osberg had grown up with a deck of cards in her hand. She was a former computer programmer who had started playing bridge in college. By the time she was running Wells Fargo’s start-up Internet business, she had won two world team championships. It didn’t hurt that she was a petite, sweet-faced brunette in her mid-forties.
“The next time she’s going cross-country,” Buffett told Loomis, “have her stop in Omaha. Have her call me.”
“Where’s Omaha?” Osberg said. It took her three days to build up the courage to pick up the phone, “scared to death. I’d never talked to a living legend before.”31
Osberg, who lived in San Francisco, was on her way to Omaha a week or so later. “I’ve never been so scared, breathing in and out,” she says. At Buffett’s office, his new secretary, Debbie Bosanek, showed her into the inner sanctum.