1. Warren bought the gum for three cents a pack from his grandfather.
2. Interviews with Doris Buffett, Roberta Buffett Bialek.
3. Two presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Theodore Roosevelt, had previously sought election to a third term. Both were defeated.
4. The Trans-Lux Corporation placed the first ticker-tape projection system at the New York Stock Exchange in 1923. The system worked something like a fax machine. Trans-Lux knew a good thing when it saw one: The company’s own stock was listed on the American Stock Exchange in 1925, and Trans-Lux remains the oldest listed company on the Amex today.
5. Frank Buffett had reconciled with Ernest on Henrietta’s death in 1921 and ran the other Buffett store. John Barber was a real estate agent.
6. Pyramid schemes are frauds that promise investors impossible returns, using cash from later investors to pay off earlier investors and create the appearance of success. To keep going, the scheme has to grow like a pyramid, but their geometrically compounding structure guarantees eventual failure and discovery.
7. Alden Whitman, “Sidney J. Weinberg Dies at 77; ‘Mr. Wall Street’ of Finance,” New York Times, July 24, 1969; Lisa Endlich, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success. New York: Knopf, 1999.
8. That Weinberg cared about his opinion mattered more than the opinion itself; Buffett has no recollection of which stock he recommended to Weinberg.
9. Buffett later said, in an interview, that these were the words that ran through his head—“that’s where the money is”—although at the time he was not familiar with the famous quote attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton.
10. Almost a decade later, he would lower the age to 30 while talking to his sister Bertie, who was 14 or 15 at the time. Interview with Roberta Buffett Bialek.
11. Buffett believes he overheard his father talking about the stock, which traded on the “Curb Exchange,” where brokers gathered in the street (later organized into the American Stock Exchange).
12. From the records of Buffett, Sklenicka & Co.