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The battle over stock options would continue formally for nearly two years, until the Financial Accounting Standards Board finally made it official. But Coca-Cola’s decision had kicked over the domino in a chain of events, and Microsoft’s action had broken through the wall of Silicon Valley solidarity that had given the technology industry a united lobbying voice in Washington.

Buffett’s momentum as an influential statesman during this period was gathering speed. Although the estate tax was still scheduled to be repealed, he found another target in the accountants who had facilitated the accounting frauds of the past few years. If the auditors had not been sitting in the laps of the CEOs, wagging their tails, he felt, then managements would not have been allowed to loot the shareholders’ pockets, transferring vast sums into their own pockets. Buffett appeared at an SEC roundtable on financial disclosure and oversight, saying that, instead of lapdogs, shareholders needed guard dogs, and directors who served on audit committees and oversaw the auditors must be “Dobermans” who “hold the auditors’ feet to the fire.”40

He said he had a short set of questions for the audit committee at Berkshire Hathaway:

—If the auditor had prepared the financial statements herself (as opposed to their being prepared by the company’s management), would they have been prepared the same way?

—If the auditor were an investor, could he understand how the company had performed financially from the way the financial statements were presented and described?

—If the auditor were in charge, would the company follow the same internal audit procedures?

—Did the auditor know about anything the company had done to change the timing of when sales or costs were reported to investors?

“If auditors are put on the spot,” Buffett said, “they will do their duty. If they are not put on the spot…well, we have seen the results of that.”41

These simple questions were so obvious, so clearly defining of right and wrong, so self-evidently useful in sorting out the truth and preventing fraud, that at least one or two other companies with directors who had common sense and were concerned about their exposure to liability from lawsuits actually copied Buffett and began to use them.

As Buffett swung his saber with ruthless accuracy, and accountants cowered and compensation committees ducked and muttered about why he publicized their bonus-pimping instead of just shutting up, and as would-be tax-cutters tried to find even nastier terms than the ultimate pejorative, “populist,” to throw at him, so encouraged was Buffett by all this newfound authority that in the spring of 2002 he outdid himself and endorsed…a mattress. He let himself be photographed lounging on the “Warren,” part of the “Berkshire Collection,” sold by the Omaha Bedding Co., as seen on posters of “Buffett and His Bed.” Now when he went down to the Nebraska Furniture Mart during the shareholder meeting weekend, he could lie on his own bed while selling his own mattresses. “I finally landed the only job I really wanted in life—a mattress tester,” he said.42

The Sage of Omaha, at whom plutocrats railed and tax-cutters shook their fists, before whom accountants quivered and stock-option abusers fled, whom autograph-seekers followed and television lights illuminated, was at heart nothing more than a starstruck little kid, endearingly clueless in many ways about his place in the pantheon. He got excited over and over by fan letters from Z-list celebrities. Every time somebody wrote him to say he was their hero, it was like the first time. When porn star Asia Carrera called him her hero on her Web site, he was thrilled. He was thrilled to be anybody’s hero, but being called a hero by a porn star who was a Mensa member had real cachet. His favorite letters were from college students, but when prisoners wrote and said he was their hero, he was proud that his reputation extended to convicts who were trying to turn around their lives. He would much rather be