Let's get this over with quick -- Warren Buffet, while apparently a moral and, in some ways ways, wise man, may have very little to teach you and me about "the business of life" based on his personal life in general. Then again, maybe he does. Warren Buffet is a mass of contradictions.
In addition to being the 1st or 2nd richest human being on the planet is/was also mono-maniacally focused on money-making, incapable of sustaining a monogamous relationship with his spouse; mostly a miser, but not quite; at best an indifferent parent - at worst, perhaps incapable of really caring about his children; absolutely cold and cruel to his adopted grandchildren (he couldn't quite see them as real family); pathologically incapable of dealing with stress or crisis in his family (and not all that prepared to do so in business either); a man with limited tastes to the point of dysfunction or autism (he only went to China with Bill Gates when he learned that Gates had taken along a chef that would make Buffett hamburgers and fries for every meal). Even recognizing the dysfunction of the family he was raised in, he rarely spoke to his mother after he left home. He attended neither his mother''s funeral nor his wife's.
However, Mr. Buffett has had an interesting life and has taken some surprising courageous stands. Brought up by (and marrying into) ultra-right wing Republicans (his father was so extreme that the Republicans eventually dumped him) and more than simply casual anti-Semites (his father-in-law forbid Warren's eventual wife-to-be from pursuing a romance with a Jewish man), it is a testimony to his personal values that he has become attached to a number of liberal causes and has been proven right more than wrong. He asked, and became the first non-Jewish member of the Jewish country club in Omaha (at a time where religion determined where one could be a member). Once a member, he turned around and sponsored the first Jewish member of the Omaha Club. He has always been somewhat of a philanthropist (although up until his startling announcement of giving 85% of his wealth to the Gates foundation, always hitting a bit below his grade-level) and the causes he supported were surprisingly liberal, i.e., women's reproductive rights.
That he has integrity in business dealings is beyond doubt and that in and of itself is noteworthy in these times. That he has been upfront and out-spoken about the need for self-restraint on Wall Street (decrying the culture of greed and the danger of over-leverage, derivatives, and "irrational exuberance") is a mark of reason and business wisdom. The fact that he has been a quiet force for dumping over-paid, underperforming CEOs who were enriching themselves at stockholder expense is laudatory. He has been consistent in his opposition to the dismantling of the estate tax -- he has always believed that dynastic wealth is a anathema to democracy. His investment record is still unchallenged. No one has out-performed the market as consistently as Warren Buffett.
However, when the Right-to-Life movement threatened to boycott one of his companies, he had the companies in question quit making donations to the charities that Right-to-Life objected to. After deriding derivatives as an evil (and after pulling Salomon out of the activity, and refusing to assist Long-Term Capital Management in their pursuit of derivatives) he has issued derivatives based on Berkshire-Hathaway.
His story is interesting - and remains so despite Alice Schoeder's daunting level of detail. Some of that detail is fun and interesting (e.g., Buffet's purchase of the Omaha Furniture Marta and his dealings with its obstreperous, Eastern-European Jewish mother owner/operator) while some of it, particularly some of the family detail, seemed overdone.
All in, Buffet ends very much on the plus side of the ledger -- perhaps the price of genius is weirdness, hard-to-understand focus, and dysfunctional families. Buffett's family may have suffered and he may have very weird habits and idiosyncrasies, but his vision regarding investing and money-making has been relatively consistent and moral. His integrity is mostly intact, and he is still - after 50 years - regarded as an oracle. For a guy who has been worth as much as $60-70 billion dollars, that is quite an accomplishment. So is the amount of wealth he has created and promised to give away.
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