Warren Buffett: 5 Things You Didn’t Know

Warren Buffett is retiring.

Sixty years at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, and now he’s passing the torch.

I still remember the first time I saw him in person back in 2003 at the Berkshire annual meeting in Omaha. The Buffettpalooza.

I think 20,000 people were supposedly there. No exaggeration.

People got in line at 5am to get into the meeting. Krispy Kreme donuts were served outside.

Then, when it was time to go in, everyone RAN in order to get a good seat. But since they had just cleaned the floors everyone was slipping, falling, sliding as soon as they got into the building.

The night before the meeting there were some parties. I got invited by pretending to be “media.” I got a special badge.

I met a guy who told me a story. He bought 200 shares of Berkshire in 1976. The shares doubled in a year or so and he got nervous. So he sold 100 shares and used the proceeds to start a restaurant.

The other 100 shares (assuming he still holds them because he told me he was never going to sell them) are now worth $74,000,000.

So it's safe to say that this guy I was speaking to is the world’s greatest investor ever. He bought 100 shares and never had to even think again about anything.

He could’ve watched MTV and eaten nothing but Pringles for the next 50 years. And now he’s got $74,000,000 in the bank. But he has big regrets. Because he sold those other 100 shares on only a double.

It’s not easy to find unusual things about Warren Buffett.

But I’m going to tell you five.

Why should you listen to me? Because I wrote THE book on Warren Buffett (even Buffett said so). Even though it has probably the worst cover in the history of the printing press.

1) His worst investment ever

I asked this question on Twitter once (when it was actually called Twitter).

I asked, “where did Warren Buffett lose both his self-esteem and 20% net worth in that order.”

Everyone came back with very smart responses.

“Conoco Phillips.” Wrong.

This is where he lost 1 billion dollars. In Conoco Philips, Warren lost not even 2% of his net worth (and certainly not his self-esteem).

“The Berkshire Hathaway BUSINESS.” Wrong

The Berkshire Hathaway business itself was a bust. But the stock zoomed and Buffett made the bulk of his net worth on Berkshire Hathaway.

No, the answer is a Sinclair gas station he bought in 1951 with a friend of his.

On the weekends he’d squeegee people’s windows. But the Texaco station right across the street destroyed him.

He lost $2000, when his savings was about $9600 at the time. He put a lot of work and love into that little baby and it all went down the drain.

But that experience probably gave him the desire to have a more passive management style. A style he later mastered at Berkshire.

2) He was rejected from Harvard Business School.

If you think about it, Harvard should have a pretty bad reputation by now.

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg hated it so much that they dropped out. And the one time they could’ve landed the best businessman ever, they rejected him.

Like most smart people, Buffett didn’t even really want to go to college.

He started out at Wharton but then switched back to his hometown college in Omaha because he didn’t like it. Then, after being rejected by the best business school in the country, he went to Columbia.

The reality is that people at the genius level (Buffett, Einstein, Gates, etc) have no use for college but some cases (Buffett) reluctantly go through the motions.

3) Adam Smith

It's useful to look at the history of the field you want to master. When I was trading for Victor Niederhoffer I saw that he had collected just about every finance book from 1800 on.

So I started reading books anywhere from 100 to 30 years old just to see what people were thinking and how finance and trading had evolved.

One book, “Supermoney” was by the pseudonymous “Adam Smith” detailing random adventures he had as a reporter in finance in the late 60s, early 70s.

On one adventure he decided to visit a retired investor (the book was written around 1972) who was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life now that he had $20 million after shutting down his hedge fund.

They drove around and had a rambling conversation. At one point they passed a furniture store and the investor pointed out the window, “I’m going to own that one day.”

Obviously, that investor was Warren Buffett.

But Smith didn’t know then that he was dealing with WARREN BUFFETT because he wasn’t in all-caps yet. And, in fact, many years later Buffett did buy that furniture store.

I thought Supermoney was fascinating for its predictive abilities. How could Smith know that Buffett would be the best investor to profile?

But it gets crazier.

In the next profile after Buffett, Smith wrote about a guy who was sitting in a Swiss jail. If you screw up a bank in Switzerland you are going to jail, no get-out-of-jail free cards.

What was this guy doing while in jail? Trying to write some fiction. That’s where the profile ends.

His name was Paul Erdmann. He went on to become the bestselling finance thriller writer ever. I highly recommend his novels.

In any case, it’s a great chance to see how someone described Buffett before he became BUFFETT.

I mentioned the book to Pamela van Giessen at Wiley and she ended up republishing the book as a Wiley Investment Classic.

I give myself full credit on that one even if she disagrees with me.

4) Zen

It's not so bad to pick up the habits of Warren Buffett for a week and try them out:

No computer on his desk

No cell phone

He plays bridge 12 hours a week (I guess he uses a computer at home for this), but Bill Gates was often his bridge partner.

Try it for one week: no computer, no cell phone, play a game for at least 12 hours for the week.

5) Love

One thing struck me as interesting.

The annual meeting was about eight hours long. I don’t recommend it to anyone. I can’t remember anything he said except one thing.

Actually I remember something Charlie Munger (Buffett’s number two) said.

Something to the effect that long-term you better bury all your guns and valuables in the backyard and at that point Buffett shut him up.

But one thing Buffett said always stuck with me. Someone asked him, “How do you measure success?”

And all 20,000 of us leaned forward to hear what the “magic number” was.

But he said this: “I measure success by how many people love me. And the best way to be loved is to be loveable.”

And that was the most interesting thing I didn’t know about Warren Buffett.