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By Root 3173 0

way, I don’t consider the girls my grandchildren. I don’t want them to expect anything from me in my will.” Peter found this inexplicable. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. His father was undeterred. That Susie had given the girls money and specified that they had the same status as her other grandchildren in her will seemed to have roused Warren’s feelings of possessiveness about money. Peter let it go, however. He figured that if his father cut the girls out of his will, they would never find out the reason. And indeed, when Christmas came and they did not receive checks, they never found out.7

Warren spent New Year’s with Astrid at the home of Sharon Osberg and her husband, David Smith, in California’s Marin County. He, Osberg, Gates, and the rest held one of their bridge orgies while Astrid shopped at Trader Joe’s. At the beginning of November, Buffett had overcome some earlier reservations that Gates’s powerful personality might dominate the Berkshire board, and had invited him to join it. Sharon and Bill had been talking for some time about the challenges that the Buffett Foundation faced. To give away several billion dollars a year after Warren was gone, it would have to change dramatically. No foundation in history had ever succeeded in such a transformation, because no foundation had ever tried. With one exception—the Gates Foundation—no other philanthropic organization had ever worked with such large sums.

Warren had also been thinking about the problem. In the fall, he had videotaped a question-and-answer session with his foundation trustees, making sure they understood his wishes and that these were memorialized. Like Walter Annenberg, he wanted to reduce the chance of being double-crossed after he was dead. After all, Boys Town had eventually double-crossed Father Flanagan. If even Father Flanagan wasn’t sacred, then how to handicap the odds on Warren Buffett?

Early in 2005, Osberg “trumped up some pretense” and made a trip to Omaha to speak to Buffett. Given his admiration for Gates, she said, shouldn’t he consider leaving his money to the Gates Foundation after he died? Though Buffett reacted noncommittally,8 he had in fact been considering leaving at least some of the money to the Gateses since well before Susie died.

Charlie Munger had already been encouraging the idea. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they had Gates running it eventually,” he said shortly after Susie died. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Warren doesn’t like conventional pomposity. Gates is unconventional in the way he thinks, and he’s fifty instead of seventy-four.”9

For a long time Buffett had felt that society was best served if he carried on compounding the money, rather than giving it away, so that there would be more to give away. But delaying the gift until his death also amounted to the White Queen’s “jam tomorrow”—a postponement in his struggle with endings, with loss, with death, with letting go. Over the years he had gradually evolved from a boy who stole his sister’s bicycle and got other people to buy his barbells, from a father who said no to every request for money from his children, to a man who gave them a million dollars every five years on their birthday, a man who bought a pink heart-shaped diamond ring for his daughter. But he still had some issues with money, which, for example, seemed to have been triggered by Susie’s will. Nonetheless, in a profound shift, he was working his way through the problem of whether to serve some of tomorrow’s jam today.

That did not mean, however, that the encroachments of time would become easier for him. A year after Susie died, Buffett found himself shocked once again by the impending arrival of another birthday. Could he actually be three-quarters of a century old? He spoke of it with disbelief. Then he seized on examples of health and vitality lasting well into old age: his mother, who had lived to ninety-two; his aunt Katie, who had lived to age ninety-seven; Walter Schloss, who was still playing tennis at almost ninety. And of course, there was his icon, Rose Blumkin.