Warren Buffett, the newly anointed "world's richest man," claims he has never been to bed with an ugly woman, but admits: "I've sure woken up with a few." In truth, the famously conservative Buffett was quoting a favorite country and western song at the time and, as usual, he was talking about his investments, not the women in his life.
Even though Buffett only made the number one spot in the annual Forbes Rich List last week, as his personal fortune swelled by US$10 billion in a year to more than US$62 billion, he has dwelt among the world's richest for decades.
What is remarkable about Buffett and his wealth, though, is his steadfastness in its accumulation. He is a plodding tortoise in a world of racing hares, whose slow and steady tactics have beaten every boom and bust Wall Street has endured in 30 years.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
In 1979, aged 49, he first appeared on Forbes' directory of the moneyed, with a personal wealth of US$620 million. It is typical of Buffett that in his journey to the top his fortune has increased exactly 100 times since then. He likes to keep his calculations simple enough to do on the back of an envelope.
What is his secret? And could you or I do the same if we wanted to?
He claims not to have one. And, yes, you or I should be able to do what he has spent his lifetime doing -- that is, making a lot of money by making a lot of very sound investments. He is an entirely self-made man about whom nobody ever seems to have a bad word to say. It's a bit sickening, really.
The middle child of three, Buffett was born on Aug. 30, 1930. His father, Howard, came from a family of grocers, but set himself up in business as a small-town stockbroker in Nebraska.
At the age of 11, Warren was already out to make a profit, selling fizzy drinks door-to-door with a friend. The pair developed an arithmetical system for picking winning race horses and set up a tip sheet called Stable Boy Selections with their drinks profits. When Buffett Sr found out, however, their little scheme was shut down.
Warren was an earnest child. He filed his first tax return aged just 13 in 1943, listing his bicycle -- used on the drinks delivery round -- as a deductible expense.
The family moved to Washington a few years later, as Buffett's father was elected to the US Congress, but young Warren did not rest on his laurels. Like a lot of kids his age, he donned the customary newsboy cap and took to hawking papers in the wealthy Washington suburbs. Buffett added magazines and comics to his bag on the days that he collected the money so he could offer something extra to the servants or the lady of the house.
Again, he didn't fritter away his earnings, but invested what he made in pinball machines that he leased to local barbers' shops. Most people in DC took the Washington Post, still the US capital's favored journal, and Buffett grew to love the paper. Even though he was only one of hundreds of delivery boys, he managed to strike up relationships with the paper's management and many years later its owner Katharine Graham.
In 1973, Buffett bought a large shareholding in the Washington Post, which he still holds today, as one of the central investments in his Berkshire Hathaway holding company. It has increased in value more than 100 times and is typical of a Buffett tip.
"The Washington Post is the stock he has held the longest," said Roger Lowenstein, author of Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. "And really it typifies his constancy. The key to understanding him as a man is that he is so constant in everything he does."
Buffett was written off in the 1990s for missing out on the dotcom boom. He didn't touch any of the thousands of fly-by-night Internet companies that managed to convince investors to part with billions of dollars before promptly going bust. That anyone can class that as "missing out" is beyond Buffett's comprehension.
He had seen it all before. He came of age in the "go-go" 1960s, as he likes to call the era. While everyone around him were investing in the latest hi-tech gadgets and faddish corporations, Buffett was following the teachings of Benjamin Graham, the economist and investor who became his tutor and some would say guru, at Columbia Business School in New York. Graham and his colleague David Dodd were champions of a method known as "value investing." Simply put, value investing relies upon studying a company's fundamental underlying value and then deciding if that value is reflected in its share price. Following this relatively simple method is how Buffett managed to make another US$10 billion in a year when Wall Street lost hundreds of billions in the subprime crisis.
As consistent as Buffett is in his professional life, so, too, is he in many aspects of his personal life. He does not live the life of a billionaire.
He bought his current home in humble Omaha, Nebraska, for US$31,000 in 1958. It is worth about US$700,000 today, a very average price for an upper-middle-income family home. He drives around in a modest Cadillac, he wears jumpers and rumpled suits, he doesn't own a mobile phone and does not like computers.
He drinks Cherry Coke -- up to five cans a day -- and likes to eat a T-bone steak, cooked rare, with a double order of hash browns from Gorat's Steak House down the street from his house. His followers are a cultish bunch who celebrate his folksy charm and flock to his annual meeting every year in Omaha to enjoy Dairy Queen ice cream and Cherry Cokes galore.
Buffett's private life veers sharply from the conventional and middle of the road, however. He and his first wife Susan were married in 1952 and had three children together. But by the late 1970s, his wife was eager to pursue her own interests in San Francisco. She owned 3 percent of Berkshire Hathaway's stock and used her money and influence to promote civil rights and abortion rights campaigns. She was also an avid singer and a friend of Neil Sedaka, who encouraged her to pursue her cabaret and recording career in California.
When she left Warren in 1977, they decided to remain married, but Susan worried about leaving her somewhat eccentric husband to fend for himself and so went out to recruit a "companion" for him.
One night in 1977, while singing onstage at an Omaha restaurant, Susan met Astrid Menks, a young Latvian waitress with whom she instantly struck up a friendship. From that day, the three formed a triangular relationship -- Susan would accompany Warren to functions in California and New York while Astrid was always waiting for him at home. They would send cards at Christmas from "Warren, Susan and Astrid," never attempting to hide their open relationship.
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.
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