If anything gives the world's second richest man sleepless nights at his home in Omaha, Nebraska, it is the certainty that a nuclear holocaust will wipe out the planet. Warren Buffett is convinced the world will end in catastrophe — the only variable in the equation is when the big bang will happen.
The 75-year-old billionaire is fond of explaining that as the population rises, the number of "bad guys" goes up. By all the laws of probability, one of them will eventually get hold of an atom bomb.
"It is the ultimate depressing thing. It will happen, it's inevitable. I don't see any way that it won't happen," he told an American interviewer. "You can't get rid of the knowledge. You can try to control the materials. You'll never get rid of the intent. It is thme ultimate problem of mankind."
An amiable, chatty character with a taste for Cherry Coke and hamburgers, Buffett is known across the US for his folksy homilies.
The annual meeting of his Berkshire Hathaway business empire routinely attracts 20,000 people and has been dubbed the annual "Woodstock of capitalism." He refuses to use computers except to play bridge and dispenses wisdom in annual letters to shareholders. Last year's version quoted Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin and the baseball legend Hank Greenberg.
Buffett likes to make moneymaking sound simple — he once summed it up as: "Rule number one: never lose money. Rule number two: never forget rule number one."
Yet for all the populist charm, Buffett is a numbers man to the core: his US$44 billion fortune is built on an insurance company and his decisions are based on clinical, rational, quantitative analysis.
His pledge this week of more than US$30 billion to his friend Bill Gates's charitable foundation surprised many of his followers: he had never shown much interest in diseases afflicting developing countries or in funding the education of underprivileged children.
But his biographer, Roger Lowenstein, says it is consistent with his methodical, unsentimental career: "His approach to philanthropy is very similar to his approach to stocks — he wants to find a few ways of giving where he can make a huge difference. He's not into `a little here and a little there.'"
Another author of Buffett books, Andy Kilpatrick, says: "Buffett is the most rational person in the world. He simply saw the Gates Foundation as the most rational way to disburse his fortune."
Gates gave Buffet an 892-page book on the impact of AIDS, TB and malaria. The Sage of Omaha declined to read it — he simply wanted assurance the money would be spent efficiently.
Born in 1930, Buffett is the son of a Nebraska stockbroker who was elected to Congress as a Republican on a political platform described as "to the right of God." Young Warren made his first trade on the stock market aged 11.
As a child, he undertook two paper rounds and topped up his savings by collecting lost golf balls. He put the proceeds towards buying farmland, which he rented out. At Columbia University, he came under the influence of an investment guru, Benjamin Graham, who taught him to look for solid yet out-of-fashion businesses. In 1962, he spotted a Massachusetts textile firm, Berkshire Hathaway, which he bought and milked for funds to pump into other areas — notably insurance.
Berkshire Hathaway's empire extends to furniture, sweet shops and Fruit of the Loom underwear. He has shares in Coca-Cola, Gillette and the Washington Post and a controlling stake in CE Electric, which supplies energy to 3.7m English homes. He shunned Internet stocks, biotechnology and telecoms. The approach has been phenomenally successful: since 1965, the annual increase in his company's value has been 21.5%. A single share in Berkshire Hathaway now costs US$92,000.
Buffett has liberal leanings. He supported John Kerry at the last election, funded the pro-choice group Planned Parenthood and has attacked US President George W. Bush for seeking to cut inheritance tax.
His personal life is unorthodox. He married in 1952 and his wife, Susan, headed his charitable foundation until her death in 2004.
Although they were close, they had a 25-year arrangement whereby she lived in San Francisco and he lives in Omaha with a Latvian-born former waitress, Astrid Menks.
Buffett's three children — Susie, Howard and Peter — will inherit only a relatively small chunk of his fortune. He says he wants them to have enough "to do anything but not to do nothing."
His words on stock market trends engender more textual analysis than those of the US Federal Reserve chief or the treasury secretary.
When the former Chinese president Jiang Zemin complained he did not understand the US stock market, Bill Clinton sent him a copy of Buffett's latest letter to shareholders.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s