The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [386]
Naturally, Buffett had encouraged Bill Gates, who had fooled around with the game a bit, to become a more serious bridge player. He also sent Osberg to Seattle to set up Bill Gates Sr. on the computer to play bridge, thus beginning to inject her into the Gates family.
Up until this point, he and Bill mainly saw each other attending football games, on the golf course, and at Microsoft events. But their relationship was gradually becoming much closer. On Easter weekend 1993, Bill and Melinda got engaged. On the way back from San Diego, Bill had the pilot give fake weather reports from Seattle to fool Melinda into thinking they were flying home. She was shocked when the aircraft door opened after they landed and Warren and Astrid were waiting on the red carpet at the bottom of the stairs. Warren drove them to Borsheim’s, where CEO Susan Jacques helped them pick out an engagement ring.
Nine months later, Buffett flew to Hawaii for their New Year’s Day wedding, which would take place on the twelfth tee of the Four Seasons Manele Bay golf course on the island of Lanai. Even though his sister Bertie owned a house on the Big Island of Hawaii, Buffett had never been to Hawaii before. He was as excited about the Gates wedding as if one of his own children were getting married, although it could have been held in Dubuque, Iowa, for all he cared. He felt that Bill Gates was making one of the smartest decisions of his life by marrying Melinda French. However, Bill and Melinda’s wedding conflicted with Charlie Munger’s seventieth birthday party, which was taking place the same weekend. The famously loyal Buffett never dropped his old friends but sometimes had to play Twister to manage his relationships. If a conflict arose, he tended to resolve it by appeasing whoever he thought was most likely to get upset at him—which generally meant that he slighted the most loyal and trustworthy of his friends, the ones he could count on not to criticize or get angry at him. This left the rejected person the paradoxical consolation that he was the one Buffett most trusted and felt closest to. People who loved him understood this, so they put up with it.
Munger, the long-standing friend, would tolerate almost anything of Buffett, even missing his seventieth birthday party. Gates was the newer friend; in fact, when it came to being in love with Gates, Buffett ran a close second to Melinda. So he opted for the wedding and brought Kay Graham with him. Graham, now seventy-six, traveled less often these days, but she still attended occasions of state like this. Moreover, Gates had just surpassed Buffett, who was now number two, to become number one in the U.S. money race. Together they made the tiny island of Lanai that New Year’s Day the wealthiest resort on earth. Warren, meanwhile, had sent Susie to Los Angeles for Munger’s party, where she sang.38
Susie, long the queen on Warren’s chessboard, was used to this sort of thing. She had her own definition of what he needed from the women in his life, and pigeonholed each of them into a utilitarian category. One night when she was at dinner at Gorat’s with Warren, Astrid, and Sharon Osberg, whom she had recently met, she looked around the table and surveyed the company. Only Kay and Carol Loomis were missing from the harem. She laughed and shook her head. “Someone for everything,” she said. She had plugged Osberg into the “bridge” category. But Susie always downplayed the others’ roles; and like all of Warren’s women friends, each had the loyalty of Daisy Mae.
Before long, Buffett was talking to Osberg several times a day on the phone, taking her along as a traveling companion on his trips, and making her one of the closest confidantes among his friends. Much like Astrid, however, she stayed in the background rather than upset the perceived order of all his other relationships,