• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3508 0

that he had displayed in bargaining for GEICO, his knowledge of technology was spotty. He remained personally indifferent to computers, while the rest of the world couldn’t buy them fast enough. Bill Gates took this as a challenge. He brought Buffett and Munger to a gathering at Microsoft to talk about technology. The evening before, he and Melinda held a dinner at their house at which she seated Munger with Nathan Myhrvold, chief technology officer of Microsoft. The two soon fell into a lengthy conversation about naked mole rats. A naked mole rat looks like a boudin blanc—a French milk sausage—with teeth; it feels no pain when cut, scraped, or burned.*31 Munger, a science buff, had some tangential knowledge on this topic. Sandy Gottesman had once invested in laboratory mice, trying to make a quick buck on rising demand for experimental animals. But Gottesman’s investment hadn’t worked out, and he got stuck with a building full of mice under some bridge in New York City. The naked mole rat was a superior beast, not only insensitive to pain but parthenogenic: The queen of the colony fertilizes and gives birth without assistance from the males. Munger and Myhrvold held an animated conversation about the sex life of mole rats while the others sat listening in numb disbelief.6

The next morning, Gates took Buffett and Munger over to Microsoft so that his number two, Steve Ballmer, and half a dozen engineers could interview them, almost as anthropologists, so strange did it seem to them that these two incredibly brilliant men were such latecomers to the world of computers. They were like a couple of cavemen savants discovered in the bush who had seen an airplane but wouldn’t take a ride. Despite his sense of the Internet’s importance, for example, it had not yet occurred to Buffett to tell GEICO to hurry up and exploit the Internet to sell insurance. To Buffett, computers were just tunnels that enabled him to reach other people who could play bridge.

“That was quite interesting to Bill, because he saw how some guy who had no interest in the computer, per se, could be drawn in by an application. The computer itself was interesting to all the people around him—but to me, only the application was interesting. You sell the computer first to people who are interested in computers, and then you sell it to people like me who don’t give a damn about computers.”

Buffett, who deemed computers outside his “circle of competence,” might still have been the richest man in America instead of Gates, had he bought stock in Microsoft and Intel. Instead, he was now number two. But he did not care. Or rather, he did care—he cared a lot; he would rather be number one, much rather—but he cared far more about avoiding excess risk. He didn’t know which company would turn into the next Microsoft or Intel and which would crash and burn. He would never give up his margin of safety. He knew that the life cycle of many technology businesses was as short as a naked mole rat’s.

Even had he been of the temperament to do so, Buffett didn’t need to make risky bets. Decisions made years ago were still compounding for him. The hiring of Ajit Jain had meant that when Hurricane Andrew blew South Florida off the map in 1992, Buffett was able to start a new business, “catastrophe reinsurance,” which charged a premium price to stand by as insurer of the unthinkable. Then the Northridge earthquake hit. Almost no one else had the capital to put up billions on a risk like that. But Berkshire Hathaway did.

Buffett’s relationship with the Blumkins brought him the chance to buy R. C. Willey, a Salt Lake City–based furniture chain. The old days of scouring the Moody’s Manuals for teensy companies were long gone; instead he played white knight once again to save FlightSafety from a corporate raider. This was a unique and profitable company that trained pilots and made the enormous flight simulators used for that training. He would go on to buy Star Furniture and International Dairy Queen. However, most of the ideas that were brought to him were what he called “cocker spaniels,