Warren Buffett 1/2

The Oracle of Omaha -- the world's greateststock market investor -- lives in a house he boughtfor $31,500, dines on burgers and quotes Mae West.He's worth $36 billion ... give or take a few mil.

- - - - - - - - - - - -By Larry Kanter
Aug. 31, 1999 Donald and Mildred Othmer were hardly a remarkable couple. He was a professor of chemical engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn, with a small consulting business on the side. She was a former teacher who spent most of her time volunteering for New York civic and arts organizations. They had no children.

But when Donald and Mildred Othmer died -- he in 1995, she in 1998 -- it turned out they were quite remarkable indeed. Polytechnic University, which once faced bankruptcy, unexpectedly found itself heir to $175 million. Planned Parenthood received $65 million. All told, the couple bequeathed $340 million to several perennially cash-strapped Brooklyn institutions.

Few who knew the Othmers had any idea of their enormous wealth, which totaled some $750 million. But the couple's hometown -- Omaha, Neb. -- offered a clue. Omaha, as any investor knows, is the headquarters of Warren Buffett, the greatest stock market investor of modern times. He also happened to have been an old friend of the Othmers. After investing $25,000 each in a Buffett-led investment partnership in the early 1960s, in 1970 the couple received thousands of shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Buffett's insurance and investment holding company, at $42 a share. By the time Donald Othmer died in 1995, the stock had soared to $30,000 a share. Too bad for Brooklyn he didn't live a few years longer -- Berkshire Hathaway currently trades at an astonishing $68,000 a share.

The Othmers were proof of one of the investment world's oft-repeated legends: Had you put $10,000 into Berkshire Hathaway when Buffett bought control of it in 1965, you'd have more than $50 million today, compared to the just under $500,000 you'd have if you'd invested in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index.

Thanks to an ability to spot undervalued companies and purchase them on the cheap, the so-called Oracle of Omaha has made many people very wealthy over the course of his five-decade career. Buffet's own 38 percent stake in Berkshire Hathaway gives him a net worth of more than $36 billion, making him the second-wealthiest man in the world, behind his friend Bill Gates, and one of the few who has amassed such astonishing riches solely through stock market investments.
Yet in many ways, Buffett remains more like the Othmers than the super-rich. With his tousled white hair and thick, tortoise-shell glasses, his appearance and countenance is most often described as grandfatherly. His annual salary as Berkshire Hathaway's chairman and CEO is $100,000. At the age of 68, he continues to live on Farnam Street in Omaha, in the same gray stucco house he purchased four decades ago for $31,500. He eats burgers or steaks for lunch and dinner, always washing down his meals with Coca-Cola -- a company in which he has invested since 1988. His sole extravagance seems to be a fondness for luxury air travel. In typically self-deprecating style, the frugal Buffett calls his Gulfstream IV-SP jet "The Indefensible."

If Buffett's lifestyle seems out of step, so is his investment strategy. At a time when day traders bid up stocks based on nothing but rumor and momentum, when bond investors place pricey and complex bets on such arcane financial instruments as interest-rate futures, it's hard not to think of Buffett as a kind of museum piece. His approach is simple, even quaint. Ignoring both macroeconomic trends and Wall Street fashions, he looks for undervalued companies with low overhead costs, high growth potential, strong market share and low price-to-earning ratios, and then waits for the rest of the world to catch up.
As often as not, Buffett's business instincts become conventional wisdom. Consider Coca-Cola Co. In 1988, when Buffett started buying the global soft-drink giant, it was a Wall Street wallflower, trading at $10.96. But Buffett saw two things that were not reflected in the balance sheet: the world's strongest brand name and untapped sales potential overseas. As Coca-Cola's earnings grew, so did investor interest. In less than five years, the stock soared to $74.50. Buffett's current stake is valued at some $13 billion.

Americans tend to revile their billionaires as much as they respect them (just look at Gates or Michael Eisner). But somehow, Buffett has managed to emerge as a kind of American folk hero. His famously literate dispatches in Berkshire Hathaway's annual reports -- in which he is as likely to quote the Bible and John Maynard Keynes as Yogi Berra and Mae West -- are read as much for their gee-whiz Midwestern wit as they are for their business insights. Berkshire's Web site is a modest affair, with a few links to some Berkshire-owned businesses and a message from Buffett, a self-described "technophobe," asking for suggestions how the site might be improved. Dozens of books and hundreds of Web sites dissect his investment decisions. And then there are Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meetings in Omaha, which Buffett's biographer Ron Lowenstein compares to "an Elvis concert or a religious revival," and which Buffett himself calls "Woodstock for Capitalists." Investors have been known to purchase a single Berkshire share just for the opportunity to pick the master's brain each spring.
The most recent meeting was held in May. More than 14,000 people crowded into Omaha's Aksarben ("Nebraska" spelled backward) Coliseum for a six-hour question-and-answer session with Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger. The news this year, while hardly disastrous, was not nearly as good as Berkshire investors have come to expect. Although the company had posted earnings of $2.8 billion, Berkshire shares were up just 11.4 percent for the year, compared to 20.1 percent for the S&P 500 and 36.1 percent for the technology-heavy NASDAQ Composite Index. The Internet stocks, meanwhile, were on fire. America Online was up more than 600 percent. Amazon.com had risen ten-fold.

Nonetheless, Buffett informed shareholders that he was sticking with companies like Coca-Cola and Gillette, despite the fact that both stocks had taken a beating in recent months. "I think it's much easier to predict the relative strength that Coke will have in the soft drink world than Microsoft will in the software world," Buffett said. "That's not to knock Microsoft. If I had to bet on anyone, I'd bet on Microsoft. But I don't have to bet."
That's Buffett in a nutshell. Amazingly, the world's savviest investor has sat out the entire stampede over technology stocks, backing away even from proven players like Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard. As for Internet stocks, forget it. Buffett says he won't invest in a company unless he can "see" it, unless he can imagine what its balance sheet might look like in a decade or two -- a shockingly long view, especially at a time when many investors hold stocks for just days, or even minutes, at a time. Such behavior would get many contemporary fund managers fired, but it's hard to argue with a man whose own holdings have outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average for more than 40 years.