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. It went public about its purchase Wednesday.

Courtenay Wolfe, Salida’s CEO, said that she and a handful of other employees will all share the lunch, which the firm’s partners paid for.

“We think we will be able to gain invaluable insights from his years of experience and current insights and perspectives,” she said. “We think lunch with Warren is going to be a once in a lifetime experience.”

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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 (EBAY) to raise money for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. Last year’s winning auction tally of $2.1 million broke all previous records.

Despite many predictions that a lunch with Buffett isn’t worth nearly as much during a recession, the folks at Glide say the pace of this year’s auction is way ahead of last year.

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“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. Years ago, Mr. Buffett called derivatives “weapons of financial mass destruction”–an apt metaphor considering that the Manhattan Project’s math and physics geeks bearing formulas brought us the original weapon of mass destruction, at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

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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. To Buffett, a weekend on an island a half-hour ferry ride from Seattle that could be escaped only by boat, seaplane, or hitching a ride over the bridge by car was an “anything for Kay” event.

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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.”

Your answer made me think of something my own professor at London Business School once said to me: “The day you take a venture capital investment is the day you sell your company.” Venture capital firms are not Warren Buffett–they have limited-term funds and compensation mechanisms that encourage them to exit their transactions once a company reaches maturity.

So, is it true that your co-owners can sell without you or otherwise push through an initial public offering of Facebook without your approval as chief executive officer?

Well, the answer is maybe.

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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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