The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [480]
By Friday Buffett’s voice sounded like someone recovering from a bad cold. Still, he refused to stop talking. But Buffett never had stopped talking, never once in his life. Since he was a little boy and astonished his parents’ friends with his precocity; since he gave his high school teachers advice on stocks; since the Alpha Sigs gathered around to hear him lecture at fraternity parties; since he and Ben Graham held a duet around the conference table at Columbia; since he had sold GEICO as a prescriptionist; since he’d first picked up a stick of chalk and taught investing at night; since he’d bewitched people at cocktail parties in Omaha and dinner parties in New York; from the first meeting of the partners to the last; from the day he answered Conrad Taff’s questions at the original Berkshire shareholder meeting in Seabury Stanton’s old loft to the latest group of students who had shown up at his door—as long as he could be teaching something to somebody, Buffett had never ceased talking.
On Friday night, he spoke to a small group at a dress rehearsal,5 then headed to a private dinner hosted by Charlie Munger. Before dawn the next morning, caterers arrived with food for the press box, the backstage area, and the vendors’ Beehive Café. People dressed in sport coats and polo shirts and T-shirts and shorts and big yellow foam hats were already lined up in a scene resembling Macy’s the morning after Thanksgiving. When the doors opened at seven a.m., they ran for the arena and marked out the best seats. By eight-thirty, every seat was filled. When the lights dimmed, talking ceased instantly. Nobody whispered, nobody straggled in late. The audience was waiting, rapt. The music began and the movie rolled.
The filming of the introductory movie for this year’s meeting had consumed a large portion of Buffett’s energy in the spring, in between trips to San Francisco and long phone calls about the problems of Coca-Cola. For the first time, it had involved real Hollywood scripting, professional studio camerawork, and—to Buffett’s almost orgasmic delight—the use of a body double. His very own doppelganger! He had been watching it over and over in the office, anticipating the audience’s reaction.
The new governor of California’s face appeared on the screen. Arnold Schwarzenegger was wearing drill-sergeant gear and sitting behind an elaborate desk in a fully stocked workout room. The movie rolled through a parody of An Officer and a Gentleman, in which Arnold, in the Lou Gossett Jr. role, browbeat Bufffett’s body double through a torturous workout, as punishment for having talked indiscriminately to the Wall Street Journal about California’s bizarre, inequitable property tax laws during the gubernatorial election. Buffett had feuded with the Journal over its selective use of his words, and won an apparently resounding victory in readers’ minds by writing a letter to the editor about his viewpoint and posting it on the Berkshire Web site. Since then, he had been simultaneously playing the incident up and trying to live it down.
“You want to quit! Say it! Say you want to quit!” roared Arnold.
“No sir! You can’t make me say it! No sir! I’ve got nowhere else to go!” shouted Buffett. But then he started cruising through the workout as easily as if he were sitting in his chair at home, reading the Journal.
The scene dissolved to the governor’s office, Arnold sleeping, head on his desk.
Aide: “Mr. Governor.”
Arnold: “I got nowhere else to go!…Huh?”
Aide: “Power-nap time is over, sir. Time to get to work on some more propositions to fix this mess we’re in.”
Arnold: “What? Oh, okay. Wow. I just had the strangest dream….”
He picked up a magazine on his desk and his