The Snowball

by Alice Schroeder

“The annual meeting? Well, I would say this, now with Susie’s condition the way it is, I think we’re going to skip the music and just—there’s no way she’ll be singing in this May’s meeting, so let’s see what happens next year.”

  From time to time he still talked about Susie being able to sing again, even though that wasn’t going to happen. And only with people with whom he was very close, such as his daughter, would he drop the occasional hint that he needed help.

  “Hello? Hi. I feel fine. I’m getting two hours of sleep every night. Oh, great. Why don’t you come down and swap cars with me? Oh yeah, there’s a ham to pick up, incidentally too. It’s here…. We will. Maybe tomorrow or something. Okay. Okay? Okay.”

  Two hours’ sleep a night.

  “If I’m thinking about something I’m not going to sleep. I slept two hours last night, actually, and I feel fine. It doesn’t kill me not to sleep. Susie’s going through this thing again about whether she wants the radiation.

  “We’ll get over it. Her inclination over this was going in a worse direction when I left San Francisco but it’s still better than it was when I got there. So.

  “The only good thing about Susie having the operation is that this is the first year, in thirty-odd years, that I won’t go to Emerald Bay for Christmas. I’m not even sure my house is there anymore.”

  59

  Winter

  Omaha and San Francisco • December 2003–January 2004

  Susie was still resisting the idea of radiation, so anxious about it that she was taking a lot of Ativan. And “Dr. Isley started giving me little Ativan speeches,” said Susie Jr., “about how I needed to stop asking for so much Ativan for her. But she was very agitated about the radiation.”

  Warren’s view was that it was a form of handicapping: If radiation improved your odds, why not do it? The surgery, he told her, was the hard part. The radiation wouldn’t be nearly as hard. But the radiation oncologist had told Susie, if anyone tells you about their radiation and says it’s not that bad, don’t believe them. Radiation in your mouth is not like any other radiation. Everything will taste like metal. Your whole mouth will be burned. Your salivary glands will be damaged or destroyed. You may lose all your taste buds. There will be a lot of pain. Susie had already had a lot of pain. She felt she had the right to refuse more pain.

  “She’s seen a lot of people die, seen people go through more than they needed to go through. We both want control over the end of life. She has no fear of death, but somehow she got the idea that by having radiation, she would lose control and that radiation would increase the chances of a terrible end. We went on for hours and hours, around and around. It’s up to her to decide what to do. But on the other hand, nothing makes sense right now. She keeps saying, ‘I know my brain isn’t working right.’ And she’s had these two doctors prepare her for sort of a worst-case scenario, in the nicest way, but just because they’d rather do it that way.”

  To calm her anxiety, every night she went through a bedtime ritual centered around a song by the singer Bono, who had befriended Susie Jr. after meeting Warren at a NetJets event. Now Susie put on U2’s Rattle and Hum DVD when she was going to bed and fell asleep to “All I Want Is You.”

  “All the promises we break

  From the cradle to the grave

  When all I want is you…”

  At the NetJets event, Bono had initiated his connection to the Buffetts when he told Warren that he just wanted fifteen minutes of his time.

  “I knew nothing of Bono to speak of. So he asked me a few questions, and for some reason we hit it off. When I gave him an idea and he liked it, he’d say, ‘That’s a melody!’ And at the end he said, ‘I can’t believe it. Four melodies in fifteen minutes.’…I love music. But actually U2’s music doesn’t blow me away. What interests me is that Bono splits the revenue of U2 among four people absolutely equally.”

  Buffett could at times be brutally rational about the way vast sums of money made a person more attractive, funny, and intelligent. Still, his wonderment had never quite ceased that celebrities of any rank sought him out. No matter how cool he tried to play it, he was flattered that no less a personage than Bono had deemed him smart. When Bono came out to Omaha during his Heartland of America tour, he contacted Buffett and through him met Susie Jr. Still a rock-and-roll girl at heart, Susie Jr. in turn was flattered and captivated by the singer’s interest in her. The soulful leader of what some considered the biggest rock band on earth, he had a romantic hipster nobility that appealed to both her and her mother. U2’s music spoke of a spiritual longing for love and peace. Their message—“the more you take, the less you feel, you gotta give it away”—was exactly the kind of thing both Susies would respond to. He invited Susie Jr. to join the board of his charitable operation DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa). And he had made a huge impression on Susie’s children too.

  “He was just terrific with my grandkids—Susie’s kids, Emily and Michael. He talked to Emily and had an enormous effect on her.”

  Bono had invited Emily to work as an intern at DATA the following summer. Big Susie, however, had never met her granddaughter’s rock-star boss. She seemed to feel that she had finished her own personal mission on earth. “Why can’t I just lie in bed the rest of my life,” she said, “and the grandchildren can come out, and it will be fine.” Is she kidding? thought Susie Jr. This is not going to happen. “You have to get up!” she told her mother. “You can’t just lie in bed the rest of your life! You’ll do the radiation and you’ll get better, and you’ll be able to travel again.” Big Susie looked surprised. “Do you really think so?” she asked.1

  Finally Susie was persuaded to go through with the radiation. She went in to be measured for the mask that the radiologist had to construct to cover her face so that the radiation could be safely applied. Buffett was now involving himself more and more in the details of his wife’s treatment.

  “I’m just nuts about her radiologist, who designs the mask and the angle of attack. She shows me on her computer exactly what gets hit from every angle, where the tongue and the vocal cords are.”

  Some of Susie’s friends questioned whether she was once again doing something to please everybody else instead of making her own choices. Nevertheless, she had agreed to thirty-three treatments, five treatments a week, with weekends off, beginning in mid-December. Since the doctors had stressed the importance of continuous radiation, the rational Buffett ruminated over the fact that the off days happened to coincide with weekends. He thought it awfully convenient for the doctors, and wondered whether his wife’s health was being compromised.

  A week after the first treatments began, he flew to Buffalo to announce a new $40 million GEICO service center the company was going to open near Buffalo to manage its rapid expansion, holding a news conference with New York Governor George Pataki. The new center would bring two thousand or more jobs to the state, replacing some of the 17,700 jobs the Buffalo–Niagara region had lost in the past three years.2 Buffett Carnegized Buffalo, a city chosen for its “smart, friendly people.”

  From there, he headed out to San Francisco for Christmas, which occurred during the first two weeks of Susie’s radiation. For the first time since the 1970s, she was not going to be with her children and grandchildren over the holidays. But she wanted everyone else to be together for Christmas, so the rest of the family gathered at Susie Jr.’s in Omaha while Warren and Susie spent the time together in San Francisco.

  For Christmas, Warren and Susie gave each of the kids another six hundred shares of Berkshire stock for their foundations—a complete surprise, which thrilled all of them.3 Howie had donated most of his money so far to wildlife and environmental causes, Susie Jr. to education and local causes in Omaha, and Peter to environmental, Native American, and local causes in Wisconsin.4 With an eye to the future, knowing that they would one day have much larger sums of money to distribute, their parents had decided to give them this gift to train them in philanthropy. Within two years o
f Warren’s or Susie’s death, thirty, forty, fifty billion dollars or more—depending on Berkshire’s stock price at the time—would sluice into the foundation, and the law required that shortly thereafter the foundation begin giving away five percent each year. Buffett did not believe in perpetual foundations that entrusted money to the whims of future generations of trustees. But with only a couple of employees, the Buffett Foundation was woefully ill-equipped to ramp up fast enough to give away a billion dollars a year.5 Warren had been giving this problem a lot of thought, and it occurred to him that one way Susie could choose to deal with it was to turn some of the Buffett Foundation money over to the Gates Foundation. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had grown since its establishment in 2000 to a multibillion-dollar philanthropy. Gates said that 4.2 billion people in the world, most of the earth’s population, made less than $2 a day. Yet each of their lives was worth as much as any American’s. These people lived in the here and now, not in some generation far in the future.

  “Bill Gates is the most rational guy around in terms of his foundation. He and Melinda are saving more lives in terms of dollars spent than anybody else. They’ve worked enormously hard on it. He thinks extremely well. He reads thousands of pages a year on philanthropy and health care. You couldn’t have two better people running things.

  “They have done incredible work, they’ve thought it through, their values are right, their logic is right.”

  Warren was still assuming that Susie ultimately would be the one to make these decisions, however.

  “Susie gets all the money. And she is in total charge of everything. My will just gives it to her, and her will just gives it to me.

  “It’s crazy to try and write complicated instruments; you don’t need to do it. Now, she could give it all to my kids’ foundations if she wants. She is not restricted. But Susie doesn’t care whether she has one share of Berkshire or a hundred thousand shares of Berkshire.6 She will probably just put it all in the foundation. Not a share needs to be sold. In the first year or two, while they were ramping up on other things, if they just matched what the Gateses did and gave them two billion instead of one billion a year, that’d be perfectly appropriate. Don’t get proprietary about it. I’m perfectly willing to let other people do all the work at Berkshire. But they would hate that at the Buffett Foundation. It seems so lacking in imagination and innovativeness. Even though it’s terribly logical.

  “Now, that isn’t what people want to do. I mean, the normal human institution reacts enormously against that. But that is not a crazy system. It’s like doubling your position on a stock.

  “He’s got people in place. And if we gave some money to him, the last half of the money would be used as intelligently as the first half. There would be very little falloff in utility of the last dollar versus the first dollar. Giving money to other foundations, it’s just not what foundations like to do. But there’s nothing wrong with copying good people.”

  Coattailing by giving some of the money to the Gates Foundation while the Buffett Foundation was ramping up to give away its tens of billions might be completely logical. What wasn’t completely logical, given the current circumstances, was for Warren to assume that Susie would be the one making these decisions, rather than himself or his daughter—and to operate under this scenario without a backup plan. Although maybe he was starting to have the embryo of a backup plan.

  Over the holidays, Susie grew despondent again about her radiation. She threatened to discontinue it. Buffett went through another stretch of spending hours and hours convincing her that she had gone this far and it didn’t make sense to stop. No matter what Susie decided, however, the radiation schedule would have two interruptions—at Christmas and New Year’s. Warren steamed. “It bothers me that they take off for the holidays as well as weekends. She’s had eight radiation treatments. It just doesn’t seem right. And the radiologist acknowledged to me that dropping the schedule to four days a week is somewhat marginal.”

  Susie was still not well enough to receive any new visitors. Neither of her sons had even seen their mother since the surgery. But Howie, his wife, Devon, and their son, Howie B., finally joined Warren in San Francisco for a couple of days. Howie, still a one-man chorus line of Rockettes when it came to energy, saw Susie “just a touch.” But the family was still not allowing other people to visit.

  “She’d just as soon conserve her strength as see anybody. Frankly, there’s a number of people that are just dying to get at her. Some of them she’s a huge crutch for, and all they’ll do is drain her if they get close, because she can’t stop being their resident psychiatrist or professor or whatever. She feels a little safer when I’m there, but she knows that if she starts seeing other people, they’ll basically try to draw energy from her. With me or with Little Sooz she doesn’t feel that way. But even with my sister or her best friend, Bella, she can’t help but go back into the mode where she’s giving and they’re receiving.”

  Susie Jr. had instructed everyone around her mother to keep things upbeat. There were things that her mother was unaware of, that had to be kept from her, and which Susie Jr. monitored the fax machine to make sure her mother didn’t see. Susie didn’t know that Larry Tisch had died of cancer or that Bill Ruane had called Warren to say that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

  Ruane was doing chemo at Sloan-Kettering, where Susie had gotten her second opinion. Warren got tears in his eyes every time Ruane’s name was mentioned. The combination of this and Susie was too much. He had some time ago abandoned the thousand-calorie-a-day diet.

  “Susie’s weight has been quite stable for the past two weeks. We keep a chart of it. I eat a chocolate sundae, she eats a little bit of the chocolate sundae. And since my diet is naturally fattening, it helps her. I’m gaining weight, and she’s stayed stable. She’s in no danger of becoming anorexic.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Nancy Munger was throwing Charlie a big eightieth-birthday party. Buffett flew down to Los Angeles for the celebration. He desperately needed the distraction, though it obviously bothered him that he would be attending the party alone, just as it had bothered him to show up at the Buffett Group meeting alone.

  He had ordered an oversize cardboard cutout of Benjamin Franklin for a stand-up routine satirizing Munger’s fascination with Franklin. Buffett had to ship the cardboard cutout to California in advance. Although he obsessed about whether it would arrive on time, it did, and he put on a classic performance, which included his singing “What a Friend I Have in Charlie.”

  Munger closed the festivities with a speech. He began by giving advice to the audience, in the latest iteration of various commencement and other speeches he had given elsewhere. Charlie’s friends and relatives and members of the Buffett Group all had copies of these speeches, now collected into a book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack.7 Munger’s favorite construct was to invoke Carl Jacobi: “Invert, always invert.” Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What’s in it for the other guy? What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don’t we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead—through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat. Avoid these qualities and you will succeed. Tell me where I’m going to die, that is, so I don’t go there.

  Munger’s other favorite theorem accused every academic discipline—biology, physics, economics, psychology, and so forth—of developing certain useful models, then applying them indiscriminately, wearing blinders. He advocated a “multidisciplinary model approach” to avoid the proverbial “man with a hammer syndrome”—the man who thinks everything is a nail. Munger collected models and laid them out as useful tools for life. He had a devoted following who appreciated the way he sliced through the Gordian knot of difficult problems, often by saying the unspeakable. They found his synthesis enlightening; some in this camp felt that Munger’s genius was underrecognized because he was swallowed up in the showman B
uffett’s shadow. In recent years, however, Munger had become a more visible advocate for his views. He was always coming up with mind-boggling arcana as illustrations. Right now, he was fascinated with the lay magistrate system of England as a model for properly incentivizing ethical behavior, and various aspects of that system were invoked in his birthday speech. Munger wandered off on a brief detour to praise his wife for her many wonderful qualities, then returned to giving advice to the audience about the models of life that led to success and happiness. He seemed convinced, however, that he (and Buffett) now lived on some elevated plane. He invoked his independence, and Buffett’s, as reasons for their success, but then said it would probably be unwise for others—including his own children—to try to emulate the two of them.

  Nancy Munger, who was standing next to Buffett, asked, “How do I get him to stop?”

  Charlie started going into his windup. “In the end,” he said, “I’m like old Valiant-for-Truth in The Pilgrim’s Progress, who said, ‘My sword I leave to him who can wear it.’” Good Lord, thought some of the Buffett Group members.

  Eventually Nancy went out onto the stage and gently led Charlie away.

  Buffett went straight back from Charlie’s party to San Francisco to see Susie, who had just finished her twelfth treatment. The radiation schedule drew out his protective instincts.

  “Four and a half weeks left. Martin Luther King Day is in January. Those radiology technicians—oh, believe me, they take every holiday there is. But, anyway, I would say so far so good. They’re saying that this week is when it starts hitting her hard, but it hasn’t hit her hard yet. She drinks what she calls this motor oil, and that’s protecting her throat.”

  Nonetheless, Susie was spending most of her time in bed. “It’s just amazing how little she is up. She’s either asleep, or getting ready to go to sleep, or getting up from being asleep, I would say seventeen or so hours out of twenty-four. We make it a point, no matter what—we walk for six blocks or so every day. The rest of the time, I just hold her, basically.”