The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [457]
But soon it became clear that sales of manufactured housing were not going to turn around.44 Buffett had not bought just as the bounce was coming back. In fact, as Ian Jacobs had flown back to report, the downward spiral in manufactured housing had just begun. The price that had looked so cheap was barely reasonable. To help the deal’s economics, Buffett had Kevin Clayton begin buying portfolios of distressed loans. It was going to take some mighty fine footwork to make the Clayton deal work out.
58
Buffetted
Omaha • Summer–Fall 2003
In September, Buffett was in a state of high excitement. Fortune magazine had named him the most powerful person in business. To many oohs and aahs, he had recently auctioned his battered wallet with a stock tip inside for $210,000 to benefit Girls Inc., a nonprofit cause of Susie Jr.’s. Next, he had auctioned himself off on eBay—or, rather, lunch for eight people with him—to benefit Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, Susie’s main cause. Glide gave HIV tests during services and held funerals and memorials for gay men whose families and churches had rejected them. The Reverend Cecil Williams’s watchword was “unconditional love,” a term that Susie had adopted like a mantra and even Warren now used from time to time. At Glide, everyone was welcome: hookers, junkies, winos, drifters.1 According to the highest of fifty bidders on eBay, two hours of Buffett’s time and a lunch for eight at Michael’s were worth $250,100—that is, more than the stock tip in his wallet. Within days, an artist’s rendering of him dressed in a toga as if descended from Mount Olympus would appear in Forbes to illustrate a list of “Best-Dressed Billionaires.” However limited the competition for that list (although billionaires were becoming pretty commonplace these days), Buffett could never have been considered a contender for best-dressed anything, were he not so celebrated and popular that pictures of him sold magazines. Not only that, the two Susies were scheduled to speak on philanthropy at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit the following week, at the beginning of October, before an audience made up of many of the most important women in America, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, and women of stature in many different fields. Buffett was elated at this coronation of his wife and daughter, particularly that they would be making the presentation together.
On the Friday afternoon before the conference began, Susie called Warren to tell him that she was going to be arriving a day late, because on Monday she was having a biopsy. She had seen her periodontist in June, an appointment that had been delayed from May by her earlier bowel obstructions, esophageal ulcer, and and anemia. The periodontist had found some pin-dot-size spots on the floor of her mouth and referred her to a specialist. Two months had passed as Susie tried to work around the specialist’s schedule and her own complicated travel itinerary to arrange an appointment. Once the appointment was finally booked, she had almost canceled it in favor of a visit to the Gates Foundation.
“No. No, no, no, no, no. You’re not canceling,” said Kathleen Cole. It was rare for Cole to contradict her friend and boss outright. But now she insisted, “You have to go.”2
At the appointment, Dr. Deborah Greenspan had felt around Susie’s neck and found swollen lymph nodes on one side. She insisted that Susie see yet another specialist, Dr. Brian Schmidt, the following Monday for a biopsy. Susie seemed unconcerned about the biopsy. She wanted to delay it in order to avoid missing any of the Fortune conference. “I have to do this,” she told