Yahoo Finance 'Becoming Warren Buffett' — Buffett like you've seen him before
If there’s a living embodiment of American capitalism, Warren Buffett is it.
Born and raised, and now growing old in Omaha, Nebraska, Buffett’s life story has become something of a well-worn tale by 2017. At 86, Buffett is the energetic grandfather anyone interested in business or investing has adopted as their own.
“Becoming Warren Buffett,” a new HBO documentary set to debut later this month, covers much of the ground Buffett enthusiasts will have tread before in their reading about the billionaire investor. But it’s sure to please both the hardcore Buffett enthusiasts and the newcomers to his story.
“Becoming Warren Buffett” is a cross between a Buffett biography and a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting — a breezy life story peppered with classic Buffett one-line pearls of wisdom on business and life.
We learn about Buffett’s discontented childhood, his overachieving in school, his rejection from Harvard business school, and the modest beginnings of his investment career. Readers of Alice Schroder’s Buffett biography “The Snowball” will remember the anecdote about the time Buffett picked up a high school date in a hearse.
We learn that the halls of Berkshire Hathaway’s modest Omaha headquarters are decorated with old New York Times covers from days when the markets crashed. “Just as a reminder that anything can happen in this world,” Buffett says.
Buffett tells us that he doesn’t have a mind which relates to the physical universe very well, instead preferring to think, write, and speak in the abstractions of business and numbers.
“Sometimes, there aren’t any good answers with human problems,” Buffett says. “There’s almost always a good answer with money.”
As a family man, Buffett was far from perfect, and “Becoming Warren Buffett” doesn’t go particularly easy on him.
When Warren and Susie’s three kids — Susie, Howard, and Peter — were young, the Buffetts ate dinner together. But as Susie says, “Physical proximity to Warren doesn’t always mean he’s there with you.”
And for the most part, Buffett was utterly useless as an assistant in making the home. When Susie was laid out with the flu and needed a pot near the bed in case she couldn’t make it to the bathroom before getting sick, Warren brought her a colander.
“He was there, physically,” his daughter Susie says. “But he was upstairs reading all the time. I always told my mother we had to talk in soundbites.”
For the uninitiated viewer, all of the charm that has made Warren Buffett into the nearly mythic figure he is today is evident.
Buffett’s quirks — including his morning trips to the McDonald’s drive thru to buy only what he can afford with the exact change in his car — are on display. Most all of the characters from Buffett’s life — his wife Susie, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger, Fortune reporter Carol Loomis, each of his children — make an appearance.
The Salomon Brothers fiasco in the early 1990s, in which Buffett stepped in as the firm’s chairman & CEO following a bond-trading scandal, in many ways accelerated his rise to the public standing he has today. This is billed as both a formative moment and as the culmination of his reputation-building finally paying off — without Buffett and his reputation, Salomon would likely have failed.
In the end, the film in many ways echoes Munger’s comments about what the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting extravaganza is all about.
“Celebration is part of what makes people work well together,” Munger says.
“It’s a celebration.”
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Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @MylesUdland
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