The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [426]
Buffett’s return to Sun Valley in 2001 was another opportunity to table-thump. But as the Gulfstream jets glided their way down the mountain wave to Hailey, the corporate chiefs heading to the Sun Valley Lodge had deals on their mind and rumors were flying. Most of the rumors concerned AT&T fighting off an unfriendly offer for its cable assets from Comcast.
For the first time, an archipelago of television news tents filled the lawn in front of the Sun Valley Inn. Equipped as though for a movie shoot with distracting lights, silver reflecting sheets, producers, cameramen, assistants, makeup people, and reporters, all waiting to wrestle CEOs into giving interviews, they fueled the rumor mill. TV cameras hovered around the Duck Pond; reporters pounced on the willing and unwilling after their speeches. They chased after people from companies that were supposedly involved in the deals.
On Friday afternoon, after playing bridge, Katharine Graham, who was now left in relative peace at age eighty-four, rode back to her condo in the little golf cart she used to get around in Sun Valley. Tall and still on the slender side, she had had both hips replaced, and one worked better than the other. People noticed that she seemed worn out and “fading,” but she had been saying what a marvelous time she was having this year. The company that she and her son Don had created, with much help from Buffett’s advice, was now regarded almost as iconic for its financial and journalistic success at a time when newspaper profits were slipping badly. Graham took obvious pleasure in the way the Allen conference brought together so many of the people she enjoyed. She had been assigned an assistant to escort her everywhere, but she had the grit to resist handling, so for much of the conference she was seen on the arm of either Don or Barry Diller, chairman of USA Networks and a close friend. At the moment, however, she was alone.
Susie Buffett Jr. and her mother, in their car, spotted Graham and drove into the employee parking lot where Graham could not see them, so that they could watch her climb the four steps to her condominium. She was taking the anticoagulant Coumadin, which greatly increased the risk of serious hemorrhage should she fall. She clung to the handrail and looked shaky but made it inside without incident.11
Later, outside on the deck of the Wildflower condos, overlooking the golf course and mountains, where Graham often sat reading the Washington Post in the afternoons, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg threw her annual women’s cocktail party for Kay, a Sun Valley tradition. Susie Buffett brought See’s lollipops, and they all gathered around Graham for a picture, with lollipops in their mouths.12 After a while, Don Keough, Diane’s husband Barry Diller, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, and several of the other men crashed the party and joined Don Graham.
Saturday dawned. The audience settled into its chairs to hear Andy Grove, head of Intel, kick off the morning with “Internet Interrupted.” Then Diane Sawyer moderated a panel, asking Meg Whitman of eBay; Sir Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony; and AOL Time Warner’s Steve Case “Pulse of America: How Do You Find It?” Sun Valley frothed and bubbled like a junior high school cafeteria being filmed for a documentary, with reporters round-robining rumors that USA Networks, or AOL Time Warner, or Disney, or Charter Communications, or some combination of them, were going to hook up with AT&T Broadband.13 Many of those present wished the television tents would disappear.
After Diane Sawyer, Buffett was once again the scheduled speaker. Since the market’s peak in March 2000, over four trillion dollars of stock-market value had evaporated.14 At least 112,000 dotcom