• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3395 0

to Simpson. Send in your résumé, Buffett said. The number one thing he and Munger were looking for was somebody who understood risk. Seven hundred proposals arrived from all over the world. One person explained, “I am said to be selfish and also ruthless” various people went on at length—great length—about why they felt they were cut from the same cloth as Buffett—without giving any real qualifications for the job; and many, many people wrote saying they had no requisite experience, but wanted to be Buffett’s apprentice, understudy, or protégé. He collected all these letters in huge boxes in the boardroom before eventually filing them away. In the end he chose four candidates who were already successful and managing money; they now waited in the wings.

After the awkward 2004 shareholder meeting, Buffett moved the business section of the meeting to late in the afternoon in 2005. That year, and in 2006, no activists had shown up. But just before the 2007 meeting, a billboard appeared hovering over a major freeway in Omaha that said “Will your conscience let you off on a technicality?” The question referred to a proposed resolution to force Berkshire to sell its PetroChina investment; PetroChina’s parent company, Chinese National Petroleum Company (CNPC), was implicated in funding Chinese sponsorship of genocide in Darfur. While not required to put the resolution on the ballot, Buffett did so, and allowed a vigorous airing of the Darfur issue at the shareholder meeting.

The supervoting provisions of the A shares meant that the resolution could never pass, but Buffett cared deeply what his shareholders thought of him and the company. The question was mooted when, by the end of 2007, for reasons that he said were unrelated to the Darfur question, Buffett sold the PetroChina investment. It had cost Berkshire just under $500 million; the company netted a profit of $3.5 billion. Energy prices continued to soar afterward, and he was accused of selling too soon. Meanwhile, the shareholder meetings remained a model of decorum; more protestors had begun to arrive at the microphone, where they were greeted respectfully. Then the festival went on.

Berkshire had bought a number of other new businesses. The most significant included Iscar, a highly automated Israeli maker of metal cutting tools, in 2006, Berkshire’s first acquisition of a non-U.S. company. For Fruit of the Loom, he bought Russell Athletics. He took control of Equitas, assuming the old claims of Lloyd’s of London in exchange for $7 billion worth of insurance float. Berkshire also bought electronics distributor TTI. In 2007, Buffett invested in the stock of BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) railroad, setting off a minor frenzy for railroad stocks. One investment that Buffett did not make was in the Wall Street Journal. He had never owned stock in his favorite newspaper by 2007 when press lord Rupert Murdoch offered to buy it. Some Journal editors and staffers hoped that Buffett would save the paper in the cause of quality journalism. But he would not pay a premium price for a rich man’s trophy, even to become the savior of quality journalism. Long ago, in the days of the Washington Monthly, the unsentimental side of Buffett had divorced his fondness for journalism from his wallet. Nothing had changed that.

In 2008, candymaker Mars, Inc. announced that it was buying Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company for $23 billion. Buffett had agreed, through Berkshire, to lend $6.5 billion as part of the deal, in an arrangement facilitated by Byron Trott, his investment banker at Goldman Sachs. Trott had been responsible for several of Berkshire’s acquisitions. He understood how Buffett thought, and Buffett said that he had Berkshire’s interests at heart. “I’ve been conducting a seventy-year taste test,” Buffett said about Wrigley’s. The Wrigley deal harkened back to the old days when he had refused to sell a single stick of gum to Virginia Macoubrie.

Buffett’s first thought after agreeing to make the loan—of course—had been to call Kelly Muchemore Broz and ask her to set aside a little