All Intensive Purposes

In 2003, I went over to Warren Buffett's house. Well, I was in a cab in Omaha and the cab driver asked me if I wanted to drive by Warren Buffett's house. We drove up to an ordinary suburban block. There was a big guy standing in the driveway of the house on the corner. He was looking at us. "That's Buffett's house," the cab driver told me. "He doesn't usually have a bodyguard there but all the crazies come out of the woodwork this weekend, know what I'm saying?"

Yes. I do. The next morning at 5:30am I went to wait outside the convention centre. There were about 3,000 people there ahead of me. Somebody was serving Krispy Kreme doughnuts. The man in front of me finished his doughnut, took his napkin and started scribbling numbers on it. "When you do your sum of the parts analysis of Berkshire Hathaway," he asked me out of the blue, as if I carried that particular analysis around with me everywhere, "what do you come up with?"

// posted by t.s. @ 5:16 PM