Susan died suddenly of a stroke in 2004 and just two years later, on his 76th birthday, Menks and Buffett tied the knot in a small private ceremony.
Buffett had long planned to leave his entire fortune to Susan, as he truly believed she would outlive him. She was supposed to give everything away to charity, something she was very good at. Much better than Buffett, at any rate.
Some used to interpret Buffett's unwillingness to give his money away as meanness. Friends prefer to say that he does not like the publicity or the sycophancy that comes with big charity.
"He has a deep mistrust of anyone who has an interest in his money," Lowenstein said. "He used to joke about the kind of people who say things like, `With my ideas and your money, we could work miracles.'"
Buffett's supposed meanness was underscored in 2006 when he disowned his adopted granddaughter Nicole for speaking out about his refusal to give her money in a documentary about the lives of the rich and their offspring. The spat was public, and ugly, and exposed a rare glimpse of Buffett smarting from an event he perceived as a betrayal.
His children and grandchildren were all well cared for until leaving college, at which point he gave them each US$10,000 -- the maximum tax-free sum -- and told them to get on with it. Nicole is the only one to have complained.
But the accusations of stinginess stopped when, in June 2006, Buffett gave 10 million Berkshire Hathaway shares (worth some US$30.7 billion at the time) to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable donation in history. Over the years, his entire wealth will be disbursed in this way, but none of it in his name.
Handing over the financial product of his life's work was a big step for Buffett, who has lined up a number of potential successors inside Berkshire Hathaway to run the company after he dies. Susan's unexpected death is said to have taken quite a toll on him and, finally, brought home a sense of his own mortality.
In his most recent letter to shareholders, he revealed as much with another of his trademark bad jokes.
"I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death, abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term 'thinking outside the box,'" he wrote.
RSS