For the second time, an anonymous bidder has agreed to pay more than US$3.4 million for a private lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett, with the auction proceeds going to a San Francisco homeless charity.
The bid of US$3,456,789 from Friday night’s winner ties the record-high from 2012, when a bidder also paid US$3,456,789 to become the most expensive individual charity item ever sold on eBay.
The weeklong eBay auction to raise money for the Glide Foundation began on Sunday and wrapped up on Friday night. By midmorning Friday, the bidding reached more than US$2.6 million, nearly US$300,000 higher than last year’s winning bid by Beijing-based Dalian Zeus Entertainment Co (大連天神娛樂).
Six of the past eight winners paid more than US$2 million to dine with Buffett, the investor who leads the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.
Buffett has raised more than US$20 million for Glide.
“I am proud to be part of something that has directly benefited so many people in need,” Buffett said ahead of the auction. “Glide is a bridge for thousands of people on the brink of despair, helping them achieve dignity and opportunity by providing them with basic services.”
After the auction, the Reverend Cecil Williams, one of Glide’s cofounders, said: “We are astonished by the results of this year’s auction and send heartfelt gratitude to Mr Buffett for his deep investment in unconditional love and community.”
Buffett has said he gets a wide range of questions at the lunches that usually run for several hours. The only limit on lunch conversation is what Buffett might invest in next, but any other topic is open.
The winners of the lunch auction typically dine with Buffett at Smith and Wollensky steak house in New York, which donates at least US$10,000 to Glide each year to host the lunch. However, when the winner wants to remain anonymous, the lunch happens elsewhere.
Buffett’s company owns more than 90 subsidiaries, including insurance, furniture, railroad, jewelry and candy companies, restaurants and natural gas and corporate jet firms, and has major investments in such companies as Coca-Cola Co, IBM Corp and Wells Fargo & Co.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained