Susie was still resisting the idea of 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. 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.”
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.”
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. Susie Jr. in turn was flattered and captivated by the singer’s interest in her. Bono 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, exactly the kind of thing both Susies would respond to.
Big Susie, however, had never met her daughter’s idol. 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. “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. Some of her 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 beginning in mid-December.
Buffett headed out to San Francisco for Christmas, which occurred during the first two weeks of Susie’s radiation. 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.2 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 of 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. 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.3 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.”
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.
“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.
“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 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.
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.
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 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. 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 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.4 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 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.
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.”
The man who had always been on the receiving end was now learning to give. Rather than being taken care of by his wife, he was taking care of her. Buffett, of course, had not become some other person. But by acting out his values—loyalty, stewardship—he seemed, in his own way, to have incorporated some of the lessons of Susie’s life into his own.