The amazing life of Warren E Buffet

The first authorised biography of Warren Buffet by Alice Schroeder is out! Check out some excerpts below:

In fancy dress; a young Warren playing the ukelele in the late 1940s;
and teaching a class in investing at Omaha university in the 1950s

Below an excerpt from FT Series Part 1: Warren Buffett by Alice Schroeder

“We’d just steal the place blind. We’d steal stuff for which we had no use. We’d steal golf bags and golf clubs. I walked out of the lower level where the sporting goods were, up the stairway to the street, carrying a golf bag and golf clubs, and the clubs were stolen, and so was the bag. I stole hundreds of golf balls.” They referred to their theft as “hooking”.

“I don’t know how we didn’t get caught. We couldn’t have looked innocent. A teenager who’s doing something wrong does not look innocent.

“I took the golf balls and filled up these orange sacks in my closet. As fast as Sears put them out, I was hooking them. I had no use for them, really. I wasn’t selling them then. It’s hard to think of a reason why you had this multiplying group of golf balls in the closet, this orange sack that’s just getting bigger all the time. I should have diversified my theft. Instead, I made up this crazy story for my parents – and I know they didn’t believe me, but – I told them I had this friend, and his father had died. He kept finding more of these golf balls that his father had bought. Who knows what my parents talked about at night.”

The Buffetts were aghast. Warren was their gifted child, but by the end of 1944, had become the school delinquent. “My grades were a quantification of my unhappiness. Math – Cs. English – C, D, D. Everything Xs for self-reliance, industry, courtesy. The less I interacted with teachers, the better it was. They actually put me in a room by myself there for a while where they would kind of shove my lessons under the door like Hannibal Lecter.” When graduation day came and the students were told to show up in a suit and tie, Warren refused. With that his principal, Bertie Backus, had had enough. “They wouldn’t let me graduate with the class at Alice Deal, because I was so disruptive and I wouldn’t wear clothes that were appropriate. It was major. It was unpleasant. I was really rebelling. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that.

Part 2 of the FT series:

By August 1991, Warren Buffett’s investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, had held a large stake in Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers for about four years – he had helped to rescue Salomon from the attentions of the corporate raider Ronald Perelman in 1987 by investing $700m. The deal made Buffett a leading figure on Wall Street, whose excess and supposed corruption he abhorred.

On August 8, Buffett was informed of a potentially ruinous scandal at Salomon, in which Paul Mozer, who headed the government bond department, had secretly manipulated US Treasury bond auctions. Salomon – with $4bn of equity supporting $146bn of debt – faced possible indictment and sanctions from financial regulators that would almost certainly lead to a run on the bank. Buffett helped to orchestrate a change in management and agreed to take over as interim chairman to try to steer Salomon through the crisis

Extracts from ‘The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life’ by Alice Schroeder