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“Oh, no, I’m not tired at all, I’m perfectly fine,” he said. “I’ve lost a few pounds I needed to lose. Astrid’s taking good care of me. The doctor says I can eat anything I want. By the way, did I tell you that I went into the hospital with a colon, but I came out with a semicolon?” Asked if he was concerned about a recurrence: “Oh, no, I’m not worried at all about that. I never worry about anything, you know. Incidentally, did I tell you that the anesthesiologist used to be my caddy at the country club? I told him before he put me under that I sure hope I tipped him well.”

Berkshire Hathaway’s press release simply noted that the polyp was confirmed benign and no further treatment was required. Despite the announcement, rumors raced over the Internet and around Wall Street again. Some insisted that Buffett must have had cancer; polyps did not require surgery. But Warren was not sick and certainly did not feel old. He still felt like the “Firebolt.”

Yet after tolerating cavalier treatment all his life, his health was beginning to set limits. Someday, his wrestling match with infinity would end; the questions he was avoiding must be faced. Since Berkshire and Buffett were interchangeable in his mind, everything in his nature rebelled against this task. Many of the questions hinged on Big Susie, who was going to outlive him. He told people that she would take care of everything.

55

The Last Kay Party

Omaha • September 2000–July 2001

By the time Buffett got his semicolon, the Internet boom had boomeranged. The dotcoms were dying at the pace of one a day: Arzoo.com, Boo.com, Dash.com, eToys.com, Flooz.com, FooDoo.com, Hookt.com, Lipstream.com, PaperFly.com, Pets.com, Wwwwrrrr.com, Xuma.com, Zing.com.1 The NASDAQ was trading at less than half the value of its peak; the old economy stocks were still swooning. The Federal Reserve had started to cut interest rates once again. Buffett’s reputation, however, began to revive.

Berkshire dipped its soup ladle into a huge stockpot of capital for Buffett to buy private companies, bankrupt companies, under-the-radar companies as the window to invest began to open again. He bought U.S. Liability, an insurer of unusual risks; Ben Bridge, another jeweler;2 and Justin Industries, parent of Acme Brick and Tony Lama and Nocona Boots;3 Shaw, the world’s largest carpet maker;4 and Benjamin Moore Paint.5 He bought Johns Manville, a home-building-products maker,6 and Mitek, a high-tech steel component fabricator.7 Even so, by the end of 2000 Berkshire still had billions of unused capital: a baled-in-the-basement, batched-to-the-rafters, wadded-to-the-walls, stashed-up-the-chimney, thatched-to-the-rooftop mass of money that continued to pour out from the self-perpetuating cash-spinning machine.8

Buffett’s foreboding prediction about the market in his 1999 Sun Valley speech had proven right so far. Now he sermonized in his letter—which had become a global media event, released on the Internet and awaited by so many thousands of people that the Berkshire Web site nearly crashed on the appointed Saturday morning—that the birth of the Internet was a chance for cynical financiers to “monetize the hopes” of the credulous. He alluded again to the Aesop’s fable he had invoked in his Sun Valley speech: Investing in the Internet is laying out the bird in the hand—money today—to get birds in the bush. The resulting “wealth transfer on a massive scale” was going to benefit only the very few.

“By shamelessly merchandising birdless bushes, promoters have in recent years moved billions of dollars from the pockets of the public to their own purses (and to those of their friends and associates)…. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”9 The audience listened, and at the 2001 shareholder meeting, the crowds started coming back.

A small part of Berkshire’s good fortune came from a turnaround at Gillette, where Buffett had been instrumental in replacing its CEO, Mike Hawley, with Jim Kilts.10 Shortly before that, near the end of 2000, he had thrown off his torpor as a Coca-Cola board