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The next morning, as he was getting dressed before heading down to the meeting, he reflected on the coming day’s events. The Teamsters would already be clogging the street in front of the hotel with their blue tractor-trailer truck parked among the students waving signs that said “Coca-Cola Destroys Lives, Livelihoods, and Communities” and “Killer Cola, Toxic Cola, Racist Cola.” He couldn’t see from the window, however, whether the Teamsters had brought their twelve-foot-high inflatable rat. The Coke shareholder meeting was becoming a rite of brand-building within the activist community.

Then the phone in his hotel room rang. He picked it up and found the last person he was expecting on the other end of the line—Jesse Jackson. Jackson merely said that he wanted to express his admiration for Buffett. They talked for a minute or two of things of no consequence, and hung up. That’s odd, thought Buffett. In fact, it was the first sign that this was going to be the Coca-Cola shareholder meeting to end all shareholder meetings.

Downstairs, protesters in the lobby outnumbered the shareholders. The glassblowers’ union handed out bumper stickers to protest the company’s purchases of bottles from Mexico.17 Protesters handed out leaflets accusing Coca-Cola of conspiring with paramilitary groups in Colombia to assassinate labor leaders. College students protested Coke’s presence on their campuses. Buffett quick-stepped across the lobby to the ballroom, where he was recognized and let inside, along with the rest of the directors. He sat down in the front row. The other attendees picked up credentials, then passed through security, their packages scanned by metal detectors as they surrendered cell phones, cameras, recorders. The security check amid the gilded molding and crystal chandeliers gave the place the feel of a crowded and unpleasant government palace in some former colonial outpost that had suffered through one too many dictatorships. The travelers seemed to have arrived at some dreary but dangerous destination. Coca-Cola put little brochures around the lobby highlighting its community projects and offered a cooler of Coke and Dasani water for people to grab on their way to the stiff-backed shoulder-to-shoulder seats into which the shareholders wedged themselves for the two-hour journey through the Kafka novel that a modern annual meeting had become.

Doug Daft made some brief introductory remarks from the podium between the two long, funereal, white-covered tables behind which the other executives had barricaded themselves. He asked if there was any discussion of the proposal to elect directors. Buffett, seated up front with the rest, turned around when Ray Rogers, president of Corporate Campaign, Inc., an agitator-for-hire group that worked mainly for labor unions, stood up and yanked the microphone from the floater who was working the aisles. Rogers started yelling that he had withheld votes “until a number of terrible wrongs are righted by this board.” Coca-Cola, he said, was “rife with immorality, corruption, and complicity in gross human rights violations, including murder and torture.” Daft was a liar, he screamed, the company’s leadership operated with “unrestrained greed,” and the company was an “utter pariah” in the United States that made its money “on the destruction of a lot of communities.” As Daft tried to reassert control of the meeting with all the success of a substitute teacher, Rogers continued shouting, shuffling through what appeared to be many pages of text. Daft told him his time was up and asked him to stop speaking, but Rogers carried on. The audio people turned off the microphone’s sound, but Rogers’s vocal cords were far too well-exercised to be daunted by the mere absence of amplification. Finally, a group of six security guards wrestled him to the floor and carried him away as the audience stared in shock and Daft stood by helplessly, trying to restore order, pleading, “Be gentle, please,” to the security guards. Then he