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By Root 3183 0

He greeted her by reaching into a box and handing her three dice. These were covered with an odd set of numbers, like seventeen and twenty-one and six and zero. “Now you can look at these as long as you want,” Buffett said. “Then you pick any of them and then I’ll pick, and we’ll roll and see who wins.” Osberg stared at the dice. She was so petrified that the numbers faded into a blur. After a few minutes with no response, Buffett said, “Well, let’s just throw ’em.” Three minutes later, he had Osberg crawling on her hands and knees rolling dice on his office floor. That broke the ice.

The secret of Buffett’s “nontransitive dice” was that each die could be beaten by another; it was like the game “rock, paper, scissors,” except that the players went one at a time.32 Whoever chose first automatically lost—because the other player could simply choose whichever die would beat the one chosen first. Bill Gates figured it out, as had the philosopher Saul Kripke, but nobody else ever had.33

Afterward, Buffett took Osberg to dinner at his now-favorite steak house, Gorat’s. He drove her through a residential neighborhood and pulled up next to a pharmacy and AutoZone store in the parking lot of what looked like a 1950s ranch house with metal steer heads next to the front door. A big blue globe traced with black continents highlighted the sign, “Gorat’s finest steaks in the world.” Seated in a room full of families eating at Formica tables, Osberg decided to play it safe and declared, “I’m going to have whatever you’re having.” A few minutes later she found herself looking at “a piece of raw meat the size of a baseball mitt.” Afraid of offending a living legend, she ate it. Then they went to the local bridge club to play, after which, at ten o’clock, Buffett took her on a driving tour of Omaha so he could show off his collection. She saw the Nebraska Furniture Mart parking lot, she saw his house, she saw the house he grew up in, she saw Borsheim’s, all from a moving car in the dark. Then he dropped her off at her hotel. Both were leaving early the following day.

The next morning, when Osberg was checking out, the front desk clerk told her, “Someone came in and left a package for you.” Buffett had come to the hotel at four-thirty in the morning and left her a compilation of his annual reports to shareholders, which he had had privately printed and bound into a book.34 She had just become one of Buffett’s people.

Not long after, Buffett sent Osberg to meet Kay Graham when she was in Washington on a business trip. She filled in as a fourth at bridge with Graham and her friends Tish Alsop, widow of her friend Stewart Alsop; Cynthia Helms, wife of former CIA director Richard Helms; and Teeny Zimmerman, wife of Warren Zimmerman, who had recently been recalled as ambassador from the suddenly former Yugoslavia. Soon, Osberg was staying at Graham’s house and playing bridge in Washington on a regular basis with people like Sandra Day O’Connor. She called Buffett from the guest bedroom. “Oh, my God!” she said. “There’s a real Picasso in the bathroom!”

“I never noticed it and I’ve stayed there for thirty years,” Buffett later said of the Picasso sketch. “All I know is she leaves shampoo out.”35

Buffett began to time his trips to coincide with Osberg’s business trips to New York. They played bridge at Graham’s apartment with Carol Loomis and George Gillespie. “We liked each other,” says Buffett, “although—she wouldn’t say this, but—she was appalled at how badly we all played.” Osberg was so gentle that she could correct him without hitting the hair-trigger button in him that reacted to criticism—Buffett always avoided or limited his time with anyone he feared might criticize him. After a few hands, she would ask Buffett why he had played a particular card. “Now, we have a learning opportunity,” she would say, and explain what he should have done.

Before long, the two had become fast friends. Osberg thought it was a shame that the only time Buffett got to play was when he was in a room with other bridge players. He needed a computer. They went