Buffett now had six step-grandchildren, and soon added a grandson when Howie and Devon had a child of their own, Howard Graham Buffett Jr., who would become known as Howie B. Buffett liked children well enough but was awkward and stiff around them and had no idea how to play with or engage a child. So he did as he had done with his own children—left them to Susie, who took up the role of grandmother with zest at family gatherings, and quickly added trips to visit grandchildren in Nebraska to her already extensive traveling routine.
Buffett involved himself more actively when it came to Howie’s career. At first Howie had gotten a job in real estate, but what he really wanted to be was a farmer. Since he had no capital, Buffett agreed to buy a farm, which he would rent to his son—an arrangement rather like the one he had had with his sharecropper back when he was still in high school. Howie trudged through Nebraska, looking at over a hundred farms and making offers on behalf of his father, who was determined that a farm be a cigar butt and would not pay a nickel more than necessary. Finally, somebody bit in Tekamah, and Buffett plunked down the necessary $300,000.18
Although he took Howie’s rent checks, he didn’t set foot on the farm. As with Susie’s art gallery, he had no interest in the experience, only the money. He compared the farm, as a commodity business, to men’s suit linings. “No one goes to the supermarket to buy Howie Buffett’s corn,” he said.19
That Buffett tried to control his children with money yet never spent any time teaching them about money might seem odd, but it was the same story as with his employees: He felt any smart person could figure it out. He handed the kids their Berkshire stock without stressing how important it might be to them someday, explaining compounding, or mentioning that they could borrow against the stock without selling it. By now, his shareholder letters, polished to a fine sheen by Carol Loomis, had tackled most financial subjects, and he undoubtedly thought that these, along with the example of his life, served as adequate lessons. It probably didn’t occur to him that his kids might need more personal tutoring than his partners.
Buffett did care very much about what they did with their stock, however, because he and Berkshire were as one. To sell the stock was to sell him too. Even so, he did not want his childen to live on Easy Street because of Berkshire Hathaway. Rather, he thought the future of his children and the future of Berkshire Hathaway would ultimately be joined not through ownership of the company, but by an act of philanthropy—their stewardship of the stock in the Buffett Foundation.
Buffett expressed his feelings on the subject of inheritance and philanthropy through a tribute he wrote in the Omaha World-Herald upon the death of Peter Kiewit, a near-mythical figure in Omaha. Kiewit’s company, Peter Kiewit Sons’, Inc., was reportedly the most profitable construction company in the world, once called the “Colossus of Roads.”20 Buffett and Kiewit never had business dealings, but Kiewit owned the Omaha World-Herald and Buffett sat on its board.
The childless, workaholic Kiewit had lived in a penthouse apartment in Kiewit Plaza, where Berkshire was headquartered, and he commuted to work by elevator. Buffett envied him this arrangement.21 Kiewit was another Buffett prototype, a hard taskmaster and penny-pincher in the office who instilled his values through pithy little sayings. The company was his labor of love, and he was often “pleased, but never satisfied.” “A reputation is like fine china,” he said, “expensive to acquire, and easily broken.” In making ethical decisions, therefore, “If you’re not sure if something is right or wrong, consider whether you’d want it reported in the morning paper.”22 Also like Buffett, Kiewit was obsessed with managing other people’s weight.
The main differences between them were three: Kiewit was a hands-on manager. He shunned publicity. And he only seemed to be a cheapskate. While in Omaha, he drove a four-year-old Ford and lived like a Spartan as an example to his employees, but at his Palm Springs vacation home he drove a Cadillac and lived a more-than-comfortable lifestyle.23 Nevertheless, in many ways, Peter Kiewit exemplified Warren Buffett’s ideas about how a life should be lived. When Kiewit died, Buffett’s tribute not only honored the man, it expressed—as much as anything that Buffett ever wrote—how he would like to be remembered himself. 24
“Starting from scratch,” he wrote, Kiewit “built one of the great construction companies of the world…. Although not the largest, it may well be the most profitable business of its type in the country, an achievement possible only because Kiewit was able to transmit, throughout an organization of thousands of employees, an unremitting insistence on excellence and efficiency.
“Kiewit was overwhelmingly a producer, not a consumer,” he went on. “Profits went to build the capacity of the organization, not to provide opulence to the owner.
“In essence, one who spends less than he earns is accumulating ‘claim checks’ for future use. At some later date he may reverse the procedure and consume more than he earns by cashing some of the accumulated claim checks. Or he may pass them on to others—either during his lifetime by gifts, or upon his death by bequest.”
William Randolph Hearst, Buffett wrote, used up many of his claim checks by building and maintaining his castle in San Simeon. He arranged to have ice hauled daily to the bears in his private zoo, much the way pharaohs used their claim checks to build the pyramids. Buffett had meditated on the economics of the pyramids. If he hired a thousand people to build a pyramid dedicated to himself, he says: “It would all go into the economy. Every dime. And a lot of forms of giving and spending are just a form of that. It’s crazy, and it’s probably somewhat morally wrong too. But there are people who would think it’s great that you’re giving employment to the people who are tugging the slabs for the pyramid. And they’re making a mistake. It isn’t productive. They’re thinking in terms of input, not output.
“If you want to build pyramids to yourself, and take a lot of resources out of society, you ought to pay like hell for it. You ought to pay a perfectly appropriate tax. I would force you to give back a huge chunk to society, so that hospitals get built and kids get educated too.”
Instead, he noted in this article, some who earned the claim checks passed them along to their heirs, enabling hundreds of descendants to “consume far more than they personally have produced; in effect, their whole lifetimes have been spent at the withdrawal window of the bank of societal resources.” Buffett found the results ironic.
“I love it,” he says, “when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talk about the debilitating aspects of a welfare cycle, where some woman had a child at seventeen, and she gets food stamps, and we’re perpetuating a cycle of dependency. And these same people are leaving their kids a lifetime supply of food stamps and beyond. But instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust fund officer. And instead of having food stamps, they have stocks and bonds that pay dividends.”
Peter Kiewit, he wrote, “made major deposits in society’s bank…but his withdrawals have been few.” He left about five percent of his wealth to his family. The rest went to a charitable foundation for the benefit of the people of the region in which he lived, the same causes that Kiewit had supported when alive. Most of the company continued to be owned by his employees, and Kiewit had ensured that they could sell only to one another. “Peter Kiewit could not have better served his community and his compatriots,” Buffett concluded.
Among philanthropists, Buffett also admired Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller as original thinkers. Carnegie had built public libraries in poor neighborhoods all across the United States. The Carnegie Foundation had sent Abraham Flexner as an emissary to study medical education in the United States.25 When his 1910 paper caused a national scandal by revealing the shocking condition of medical schools, Flexner convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to donate enough money to revolutionize medical education. Rockefeller also wanted to tackle problems that lacked a natural funding constituency. He found that poor black colleges, lacking rich alumni, had no way to improve themselves. “In effect,
John D. Rockefeller became their alumnus,” Buffett says. “He tackled problems without concern of which among them was most popular, and he backed them up big-time.”
At this point, the Buffett Foundation had a token $725,000 and gave away less than $40,000 a year, nearly all to education.26 Susie ran the Buffett Foundation, which reflected their joint philosophy that money should go back to society. If she’d had access to them, Susie would have given away large amounts quickly. But Buffett was in no rush. He felt that by allowing the money to compound over time, there would be more to give away in the end—after he was gone. Certainly by 1983 he had a good argument in favor of this idea. Between 1978 and the end of 1983, the Buffetts’ net worth had increased by a stunning amount, from $89 million to $680 million.
As he became richer, requests for money from friends, strangers, and charities poured in to Kiewit Plaza. Some were heartfelt pleas from the genuinely needy. Other people seemed to feel entitled to his money. The United Way, universities, cancer, churches, heart disease, the homeless, the environment, the local zoo, the symphony, the Boy Scouts, the Red Cross—all deserving causes, but the answer was the same: If I did it for you, I would have to do it for everybody. Some of his friends agreed with him, while others were perplexed that a man so generous with his time, advice, and wisdom was such a tightwad with his cash. It’s not like it would kill him to peel off a few bucks, they said. Why didn’t he find the joy in giving?
But as long as Buffett was still amassing the snowball, promising to give it all away after he died was like the “jam tomorrow” of Alice in Wonderland’s White Queen. “After he died” was the same as never; another hedge against mortality, one of Buffett’s great preoccupations. The “White Queen” form of denial was self-reinforcing in a peculiar way. By now, the Buffetts had at least nine friends or relatives who had, or whose family members had, attempted or committed suicide. Most recently, one of his friends’ sons had driven his car off a cliff on Christmas Eve. Then, Rick Guerin’s wife, Ann, had shot and killed herself a few days before their son’s eighth birthday. By now, Buffett had a queasy preoccupation with suicide that was perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. Yet he himself was determined to live as long as possible—and to make money until the very end.
As his wealth grew, Buffett’s often articulated and unwavering determination to keep making money at a furious rate while withholding it from his family and his foundation finally sparked a rebellion among his friends. Rick Guerin had written to Joe Rosenfield about the possibility of Buffett becoming the world’s richest man: “What will Warren do when he becomes No. 1 sled dog and sees that there’s more to the world than hair and a small target? (He thinks it’s a bull’s-eye, but we know better.)”27
When the Buffett Group met in Lyford Cay, Bahamas, between the snorkeling and deep-sea fishing George Gillespie sparked a hot debate by organizing a talk on “The Children (and Charity) Will Have to Wait.” Years earlier Buffett had said he gave his kids a few thousand dollars for Christmas each year and told them to expect half a million dollars when he died.28 That, he thought, was “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”29 This phrase would become one of his mantras, repeated over the years. “Warren, that’s wrong,” said Larry Tisch, one of his former partners. “If they aren’t spoiled by age twelve, they won’t be spoiled.”30 Kay Graham, tears streaming down her face, asked, Don’t you love your children, Warren?
Prompted by Carol Loomis, Fortune took up the issue in a cover story: “Should You Leave It All to the Children?” Family comes first, many people said.
“My kids are going to carve out their own place in the world and they know that I’m for them, whatever they want to do,” Buffett said. But “just because they came out of the right womb,” setting them up with a trust fund—which he considered “a lifetime supply of food stamps”—could be “harmful” and an “antisocial act.”31 This was the rational Buffett. This Buffett had once written to a friend when his children were toddlers that he wanted to see “what the tree has produced” before deciding what to do about giving them money.32
Nevertheless, Buffett had made a decision that demonstrated newfound—if slight—flexibility. In 1981, he set up an innovative program in which Berkshire Hathaway would contribute $2 per share to a charity of the shareholder’s choice. Berkshire did not pay a dividend, but this program allowed the shareholders to direct how the company spent its charitable dollars rather than letting top management donate to its pet causes and receive the credit. The program did not allocate much money, but for Buffett to do it at all was a loosening of the fist. And the shareholders loved it. The participation rate in the program was always close to one hundred percent.
To Buffett, the collector of information, the contributions program also turned out to be a tiny gold mine. It gave him an insight into the philanthropic interests of each shareholder, which he could never have gotten any other way. Collecting this information had no purpose whatsoever—even less than collecting nuns’ fingerprints. Buffett, however, was insatiably curious and had a deep interest in knowing about his shareholders as individuals, as if they were part of an extended family, which was how he thought of them.
At fifty-three, Buffett—who had already “retired” twice—was thinking through issues of philanthropy and inheritance. The subject that visibly unnerved him was retirement. He joked about working after he was dead and made a point of highlighting elderly managers like Gene Abegg and Ben Rosner. But now they had retired, and Lou Vincenti had Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that Warren’s next move would be to strike a deal with an eighty-nine-year-old woman, one who would outlast anyone he had ever met.
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Rose
Omaha • 1983
Rose Gorelick Blumkin came to Omaha from the tiny village of Shchedrin, in the region of Minsk. Born in 1893, she and her seven brothers slept on straw on the bare floor of a two-room log house because her rabbi father couldn’t afford to buy them a mattress.
“I dreamed all my life, since I was six years old,” she said. “The first dream of mine was to go to America.
“In Russia, they used to have pogroms against the Jews. They’d cut up the pregnant women and take out the kids. They’d tear up their fathers and then have a dance in the main market. I was six years old when I found out about that. I said, I’m going to America when I grow up.”1
At thirteen, Rose walked barefoot for eighteen miles to the nearest train station to save the leather soles of her brand-new shoes. She had the equivalent of four cents in her pocket and hid under a train seat for three hundred miles to save her money, until she reached the closest town, Gomel. There she knocked on twenty-six doors until the owner of a dry-goods store responded to her proposition. “I’m not a beggar,” the four-foot-ten-inch girl said. “I’ve got four cents in my pocket. Let me sleep in your house and I’ll show you how good I am.” The next morning, “When I came to work I waited on customer. I rolled out the material and I added it up before anybody picked up a pencil. And at twelve o’clock he asked me if I was going to stay.”2
By age sixteen, she was a manager, supervising six married men. “Don’t worry about the men, Mamma!” she wrote her mother. “They all mind me!”3 Four years later she married Isadore Blumkin, a shoe salesman in Gomel.4 That same year, World War I broke out, vigilantes ran amok in Russia, and Rose made up her mind. They had money for only one passage to America, so she sent her husband and started saving to go herself. Two years later, the czarist monk Rasputin was killed by revolutionaries in December 1916. Fearing the chaos that would ensue even more than the cruelties of the czarist regime, Rose began her journey to America two weeks later, boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway on a train headed for China.
For seven days she rode the train until, at the border town of Zabaykai’sk, a Russian guard stopped her before she could enter China. She told the man she was buying leather for the army and
promised him a bottle of slivovitz on her return. Either naive or lenient, he let her through the border. She rode through Harbin, Manchuria, to Tientsin, China, on another train. By then Rose had journeyed over nine thousand miles across almost the entire continent of Asia.5 From Tientsin she used her small stock of money to take a boat to Japan, with stops at Hiroshima and Kobe along the way, until she finally arrived in Yokohama. There she waited for another two weeks until finding the Ava Maru, a cargo boat carrying peanuts that gave her steerage passage to the United States. As the Ava Maru crossed the Pacific for six leisurely weeks on its way to Seattle, “I never saw so many peanuts,” she said later. “I thought I’d never get here.”6 She had carried dry black bread on board but was too sick for most of the journey to eat.7
Landing in Seattle on the Jewish holiday Purim after almost three months of travel with a face swollen from illness, Rose was met at the dock by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, fed a kosher dinner, and given a hotel room. “When I came to this country,” she said, “I thought I am the luckiest one in the whole world.”8 The HIAS put a tag around her neck with her name and “Ft. Dodge, Iowa,” where her husband had settled and was working as a junk peddler. They sent her on a train through Minneapolis to Fort Dodge, where the American Red Cross met her and reunited her with Isadore. Rose got pregnant right away and gave birth to a daughter, Frances. She didn’t know a word of English.
The Snowball Page 63