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His seventy-fifth birthday party took place at Sharon and David’s, with Astrid, Bill Gates, and his sister Bertie in attendance. His birthday cake was a white-chocolate replica of a $100 bill. On Saturday morning, Smith had arranged for Buffett to take on Ariel Hsing, a nine-year-old Chinese-American Ping-Pong champion. With the video camera rolling, the little girl crushed him. After a fierce bridge tournament the following morning, an artist whom Osberg and Smith had hired came over to amuse Buffett and Gates by trying to teach them the art of landscape painting. Buffett gamely swiped away with a brush at acrylics, but painting, unlike Ping-Pong, was not rhythmic and repetitious, and the results were hilarious. He produced a canvas adorned with trees that resembled brown lollipops. Meanwhile, the previous day’s Ping-Pong game was fermenting an idea. Why not add the video of him getting trounced by Ariel Hsing to the ever-expanding movie at the shareholders’ meeting?

Before 2003, Buffett’s need for attention had been satisfied by a few interviews a year and the shareholder meeting. He had always been careful and strategic in his cooperation with the media (if not always forthcoming about just how cooperative he had been). But starting around the time of Susie’s illness, for whatever reason, he had begun to need the mirror of media attention, television cameras especially, almost like a drug. The intervals he could tolerate without publicity were growing shorter. He cooperated with documentaries, spent hours talking to Charlie Rose, and became such a regular on CNBC that it started to prompt puzzled queries from his friends.

The Buffett who so craved attention contrasted markedly with the Buffett who focused with unaltered intensity on Berkshire Hathaway. To see him flip from one mode into the other in half a second was head-spinning. In addition to adding Bill Gates to the board, he now set up a “whistleblower line” so that employees could report wrongdoing. And—in a major step toward the day when Berkshire’s board would have to make decisions without him—he initiated separate meetings of the board without his presence. Yet he remained as focused on investing as he had been as a younger man.

Since the Federal Reserve’s dramatic interest rate cuts in the wake of 9/11, the market had steadily recouped its losses until it was nearing bubble-era levels. Buffett wrote in his 2004 letters to shareholders: “My hope was to make several multibillion dollar acquisitions that would add new and significant streams of earnings to the many we already have. But I struck out. Additionally, I found very few attractive securities to buy. Berkshire therefore ended the year with $43 billion of cash equivalents, not a happy position.” The following year, Berkshire used part of this money to make four small acquisitions—Medical Protective Company and Applied Underwriters, two insurance businesses; Forest River, a recreational-vehicle manufacturer; and Business Wire, which distributed public-relations material for corporations—and one larger acquisition, PacifiCorp, a major electric utility, for MidAmerican Energy. While MidAmerican had not yet spawned a series of huge acquisitions as Buffett had hoped, the wisdom of buying it had grown clearer. Oil prices had continued to rise. MidAmerican had a significant toehold in alternative energy. Its relationships with consumers and regulators were excellent. Its CEO, David Sokol, was often mentioned as a potential successor to Buffett, although Buffett himself was keeping his cards very close to the vest.

Buffett also used this report to reiterate that he was still down on the dollar, and thought it would decline. The dollar had strengthened since his first article, and now his view was being widely criticized in the financial press. He had reduced his currency bets in favor of buying foreign stocks, but nothing changed his view. And once again, he decried excessive executive compensation. On derivatives, a topic he now covered every year, Buffett wrote:

“Long ago Mark Twain said: ‘A man who tries