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As he did every year, Buffett spent the holidays with Susie and the family at their vacation home in Emerald Bay, the house garlanded with Christmas decorations from Susie’s huge collection.41 His work life may have been particularly challenging then, but Christmas of 1999 was a good one for his family. Warren was satisfied with the way his kids were maturing. Howie had settled down into life as a middle-aged farmer and successful businessman. Big Susie had gotten him interested in photography. Now he lived on an airplane half the time, photographing dangerous wild animals, his love of living on the edge channeled into getting bitten by a cheetah and chased by a polar bear.

A full-time mother of two children and unpaid part-time assistant to her father, Susie Jr. had followed in her mother’s footsteps to become a major force in Omaha philanthropy, serving on the boards of the children’s theater, the children’s museum, and Girls Inc. Her ex-husband Allen ran the Buffett Foundation, and the two lived a few blocks apart and shared parenting.42

After his divorce, Peter had married Jennifer Heil and was still living in Milwaukee and writing music. In the early 1990s, he had gotten the opportunity to move to Hollywood and work in the entertainment industry. But “I realized if I moved to L.A.,” he says, “I’d be one of thousands of me’s out there trying to get work. My father was always into the movie The Glenn Miller Story. Glenn Miller searched and searched to find his sound; my father used to always talk about ‘finding your sound.’” Peter stayed in Milwaukee rather than going to L.A., and felt that his father understood the resemblance to his choice to come back to Omaha to do things his way rather than staying in New York. Soon after, Peter was hired to compose and produce the soundtrack for an important PBS documentary, the eight-part 500 Nations. He had also written and produced a multimedia show as a benefit performance for Susie Jr. that became a PBS special, and toured with it for eleven weeks.43

Howie had been working on Big Susie, convincing her that the kids were mature enough, saying, “Give us a chance, the money is there, give us the chance to do something with it.”44 That Christmas, Susie Jr., Howie, and Peter were shocked to receive five hundred shares of Berkshire stock in foundations that each could manage and give to any causes they chose. The kids were elated; Susie Jr. called it “gigantic.”45

The family settled in for New Year’s Eve. You could follow the progress of the millennium’s arrival on television, starting in the Kiribati Islands. From Sydney to Beijing to London, millions of people celebrated on streets and beaches as a chain of fireworks shot around the globe. The Eiffel Tower’s millennium clock broke down. But as the hours ticked by, nothing disastrous happened anywhere, even at General Re and Coca-Cola. There was a mathematical neatness to the progression of time zones, locations, hours, that Buffett liked. After the stressful fall he had just spent, the change of millennium was not exciting to him—it was relaxing, and he needed that.

PART SIX

Claim Checks

53

The Genie

Omaha • 1998

Buffett was always wary of falling into what Munger called the Shoe Button Complex, pontificating on any and all subjects merely because he was an expert on business. But by the mid-1990s, both he and Munger were starting to receive—and answer—more and more questions about the business of life. He often treated the athletes and college students to whom he periodically spoke to the fable of the Genie.

“When I was sixteen, I had just two things on my mind—girls and cars,” Buffett would say, taking a little poetic license here by leaving out the part about the money. “I wasn’t very good with girls. So I thought about cars. I thought about girls, too, but I had more luck with cars.

“Let’s say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, ‘Warren, I’m going to give you the