The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

PART ONE

The Bubble

1

The Less Flattering Version
Omaha • June 2003
Warren Buffett rocks back in his chair, long legs crossed at the
knee behind his father Howard’s plain wooden desk. His expensive
Zegna suit jacket bunches around his shoulders like an untailored
version bought o the rack. The jacket stays on all day, every day,
no matter how casually the other fifteen employees at Berkshire
Hathaway headquarters are dressed. His predictable white shirt sits
low on the neck, its undersize collar bulging away from his tie,
looking left over from his days as a young businessman, as if he had
forgotten to check his neck size for the last forty years.
His hands lace behind his head through strands of whitening hair.
One particularly large and messy finger-combed chunk takes o
over his skull like a ski jump, lofting upward at the knoll of his right
ear. His shaggy right eyebrow wanders toward it above the
tortoiseshell glasses. At various times this eyebrow gives him a
skeptical, knowing, or beguiling look. Right now he wears a subtle
smile, which lends the wayward eyebrow a captivating air.
Nonetheless, his pale-blue eyes are focused and intent.
He sits surrounded by icons and mementos of fifty years. In the
hallways outside his oce, Nebraska Cornhuskers football
photographs, his paycheck from an appearance on a soap opera, the
offer letter (never accepted) to buy a hedge fund called Long-Term
Capital Management, and Coca-Cola memorabilia everywhere. On
the coffee table inside the office, a classic Coca-Cola bottle. A
baseball glove encased in Lucite. Over the sofa, a certicate that he
completed Dale Carnegie’s public-speaking course in January 1952.
The Wells Fargo stagecoach, westbound atop a bookcase. A Pulitzer
Prize, won in 1973 by the Sun Newspapers of Omaha, which his
investment partnership owned. Scattered about the room are books

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder