The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [415]
Even some of his most devoted believers were questioning his wisdom, as the stock market’s repudiation of Buffett’s Sun Valley manifesto grew even louder in the last few months of 1999. That December, he continued to look not just wrong about technology stocks but dead wrong and, at last, stubbornly blind to the obvious. The Dow closed the year up twenty-five percent. The NASDAQ blasted through 4,000 points, up an incredible eighty-six percent. The market valued Berkshire, with its burgeoning coffers of cash, at only $56,100 per share now, for a total market capitalization of $85 billion. That compared poorly to a little online media company called Yahoo!, which had quadrupled in the last year. Yahoo!, which captured the spirit of the times in its name, was now valued at $115 billion.
As 1999 spun to a close, there was no doubt who was important and influential at the turn of the millennium, and even less doubt who was not. Time magazine crowned Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos as its person of the year, comparing him in importance to Queen Elizabeth, Charles Lindbergh, and Martin Luther King Jr. Buffett’s personal ranking had dropped on the annual taking-stock lists, which multiplied a thousandfold that year with the millennial summings-up and retrospectives. He had just fallen from being the second-richest to the fourth-richest man in the world. Technophiles reveled in pointing out the great investor’s feet of clay, saying that “if Buffett headed a mutual fund, he’d be looking at a second career.”38 Barron’s, a weekly must-read on Wall Street, put him on its cover with the accompanying headline “Warren, What’s Wrong?” and the comment that Berkshire stock had “stumbled” badly.39 He might as well have had a bull’s-eye painted on his brow.
In public, Buffett repeated constantly—in almost unvarying terms—the ideas that had made him famous: the margin of safety, the circle of competence, Mr. Market’s vagaries. He still maintained that a stock is a piece of a business, not a bunch of numbers on a screen. All through the market’s dizzy rise, he refrained from arguing or disputing any of the madness, except for making his now-famous speech at Sun Valley. People thought, from the way he disciplined every syllable that exited his mouth, that he was above the criticism. “Never,” he said, when asked if it bothered him when people called him a has-been. “Nothing bothers me like that. You can’t do well in investing unless you think independently. And the truth is, you are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. In the end, that’s what counts.”40
But these were separate issues. While he had no problem thinking independently, he was indeed miserable over being called a has-been. Asked around then if being in the public eye for decades helped keep the criticism in perspective, Buffett paused for a long while. “No. It never gets easier,” he said soberly. “It always hurts just as much as the first time.” But he could not do a thing about it.
Buffett had spent his whole career competing in a contest that was impossible to win. No matter how much money he made and no matter how long he kept it up, sooner or later he would have a bad year or the momentum would slow down. He knew that. Over and over he had warned investors that trees don’t grow to the sky. But that had never stopped him from climbing as fast as he could. And he had loved the climb—but somewhat to his surprise, there was no blue ribbon waiting at the top.
His life was fascinating, his business accomplishments important, the principles through which he had succeeded worthy of study. So far as could be determined, everyone who knew him personally liked the man. His kaleidoscope personality perpetually revealed new facets, yet remained faithful at its core