When Warren Buffett auctioned off lunch with himself for charity last month, the winning bidder remained anonymous.
It turns out that the person who spent $1,680,300 for lunch with the investment guru wasn’t a person at all: it was Canadian wealth-management firm Salida Capital.
Even in a recession, lunch with Warren Buffett turns out to be a hot commodity.
The investment guru and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has an annual ritual of auctioning a steak lunch with himself on eBay to raise money for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. Last year’s winning auction tally of $2.1 million broke all previous records.
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” So saith Warren Buffett, the Wizard of Omaha. Words to bear in mind as we bail out banks and buy up mortgages and tweak interest rates, and nothing, nothing seems to make any difference on Wall Street or Main Street.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates met for the first time over the Fourth of July holiday in 1991, when Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post, and her editorial page editor and friend Meg Greenfield had dragged Buffett to Greenfield’s house on Bainbridge Island for a long holiday weekend.
I read with great interest your recent interview with Kara Swisher at the D6 Conference. I was particularly struck by your answer to Kara Swisher’s question about whether Facebook, the popular social networking site you created, can be sold by your venture capital co-owners without your approval. Your response: “I don’t think so.”
We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press-release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about No. 32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked No. 6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search-engine results too. Is this true? I think it’s a fair claim–and there’s no reason why Business Wire shouldn’t feature in Techmeme if it is “breaking” news stories or is being linked to by bloggers. In fact it does indeed route around blogs that simply regurgitate PR–which is a good thing in my book!
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