The "Shabbos Goy" of Omaha: Warren Buffett

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

I don't know about you, but Berkshire Hathaway always seemed like a Jew-Run organization... penny pinching and kicking down labor.. and supporting abortion...  his Jew Financial Advisor...(Scam Kosher Side-kick)  Charlie Munger was a massive PRO-ABORTIONIST... -- CSR


A young Warren Buffett jokes to Rabbi Myer Kripke about marrying the Rabbi's daughter:

Buffett: the making of an American capitalist
 By Roger Lowenstein
http://books.google.com/books?id=2sTxGq ... &lpg=PA116


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June 1, 2006
Warren Buffett's Jewish Connection

By Chanan Tigay

Warren Buffett is not a Jew; in fact, he describes himself as an agnostic.

Still, the billionaire investment guru, who made big news in May when his Berkshire Hathaway corporation bought an 80 percent share in the Israeli metalworks conglomerate, Iscar, for $4 billion, for years has been making his mark on the U.S. Jewish community back home -- although sometimes in a roundabout way.

"Proportionally, if you look at the number of Jews in this country and in the world, I'm associated with a hugely disproportionate number," said Buffett, the second-richest man in the world. His life, he added, "has been blessed by friendship with many Jews."

The Israeli government stands to reap about $1 billion in taxes on Buffett's purchase of Iscar. Shortly after announcing the deal, Buffett said he was surprised to learn that a Berkshire subsidiary, CTB International, was purchasing a controlling interest in another Israeli company, AgroLogic.

In Israel -- which Buffett plans to visit in the fall -- the hope is that the deals will have longer legs: Buffett himself has not ruled out future purchases there and, considering his status as a leading investor, observers say others also may take a look at Israeli companies now that Buffett has done so.

"You won't find in the world a better-run operation than Iscar," Buffett says. "I don't think it's an accident that it's run by Israelis."

Among the first companies Buffett acquired after launching Berkshire Hathaway, the Omaha-based investment and insurance giant, was The Sun Newspapers of Omaha, then owned by Stan Lipsey, one-time chairman of The Jewish Press, Omaha's Jewish newspaper.

"At the time, the Omaha Club did not take Jewish members, and the Highland Country Club, a golf club, didn't have any [non-Jewish] members," Lipsey recalled. "Warren volunteered to join the Highland" -- rather than the Omaha -- "to set an example of nondiscrimination."

Buffett happily recalls the fallout from his application.

"It created this big rhubarb," he said. "All of the rabbis appeared on my behalf, the [Anti-Defamation League] guy appeared on my behalf. Finally they voted to let me in."

But that wasn't the end of the story, Buffett said. The Highland had a rule requiring members to donate a certain amount of money to their synagogues. Buffett, of course, wasn't a synagogue member, so the club changed its policy: Members now would be expected to give to their synagogues, temples or churches.

But that still didn't quite work, Buffett recalls with a laugh, because of his agnosticism.

In the end, the rule was amended to ask simply that members make some sort of charitable donation, and the path to Buffet's membership was clear.

"He's an incredible guy," said Lipsey, today the publisher of the Buffalo News. In 1973, The Sun won a Pulitzer Prize in local investigative specialized reporting for an expose on financial impropriety at Boys Town, Neb.

"Warren came up with the key source for us knowing what was going on out there," Lipsey said.

Buffett himself researched Boys Town's stocks to bolster the story, Lipsey added.

In the 1960s, Omaha Rabbi Myer Kripke decided to invest in his friend Buffett's new business venture. Their wives had become friendly, he said, and the foursome enjoyed playing the occasional game of bridge together.

"My wife had no card sense and I was certainly no competition to Warren, who is a very good bridge player and a lover of the game," said Kripke, rabbi emeritus of Omaha's Conservative Beth El Synagogue. "He's very bright and very personable and very decent. He is a rich man who is as clean as can be."

Kripke, father of the noted philosopher Saul Kripke, bought a few shares in Berkshire Hathaway and quickly sold them, doubling his money, he said.

Recognizing a good thing when he saw it, he bought a bunch more shares in his friend's company, shares that by the 1990s had made Kripke -- who says he never earned more than $30,000 a year as a rabbi -- a millionaire.

Asked if he credits Buffett with his financial success, he didn't hesitate.

"Entirely, yes," he said. "I never had much of an income."

The Sun newspaper group was not Buffett's only early purchase of a Jewish-owned company. In 1983, sealing the deal with a handshake, Buffett bought 90 percent of the Nebraska Furniture Mart from Rose Blumkin, a Russian-born Jew who moved to the United States in 1917.

In 1989, he purchased a majority of the stock in Borsheim's Fine Jewelry and Gifts, a phenomenally successful jewelry store, from the Friedman family.

"He has many friends in the Jewish community," said Forrest Krutter, secretary of Berkshire Hathaway and a former president of the Jewish Federation of Omaha.

Buffett's former son-in-law, Allen Greenberg, is a Jew, and now runs the Buffett Foundation, much of whose work has dealt with reproductive rights and family-planning issues. Buffett's personal assistant is Ian Jacobs, who goes by his Hebrew name, Shami.

Buffett himself counts the late Nebraska businessman Howard "Micky" Newman and philanthropist Jack Skirball as among his "very closest friends."

Further, Buffett said his "hero and the man who made me an investment success" was Ben Graham. Graham, along with Newman's father, Jerry, ran a New York fund called Graham-Newman Corp.

"After besieging Ben for the three years after I received my degree from Columbia, Ben and Jerry finally hired me," Buffett said. "I was the first gentile ever employed by the firm -- including secretaries -- in its 18 years of existence. My first son bears the middle name Graham after Ben."

Buffett "is very much honored in the Jewish community," Kripke said.

http://www.jewishjournal.com/nation/art ... _20060602/


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Local business students visit billionaire Warren Buffett

Published: Friday, December 4, 2009 1:10 AM EST
DR. TODD A. FINKLE
Special to the CJN

On Nov. 6, 27 University of Akron students spent a day in Omaha, Neb., learning about business, ethics and life from the second-richest man in the world, Warren Buffett, the "Oracle from Omaha." Buffett is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate of over 70 companies with over 246,000 employees that also invests in numerous companies and investment vehicles.  

Akron was one of a few select schools invited to Berkshire's global headquarters this year. But it was not by accident.

Having been raised with Jewish roots in Omaha, when one of my relatives told me about this opportunity three years ago, I thought I might have a great shot at it. After all, I went to Omaha Central High School with Peter Buffett, Warren's youngest son. I thought that might give me an advantage.

How foolish to think that this connection would influence the Oracle. Buffett firmly believes you have to "earn" it ... nothing is handed to you. In fact, his administrative assistant told me that the list was so long, not to bother putting our name on the waiting list.
However, this did not stop me from learning about one of the most prolific business minds of our time. I decided to write an in-depth case study on Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. Over a two-year period, I wrote a case, got it accepted at an academic journal, and sent a copy to Buffett. Within 10 days, Buffett wrote me a letter informing me that we had been selected to visit him this year.

After a very competitive process, I chose 27 students from a variety of backgrounds to attend the meeting.

Our day with Buffett started with a tour of Nebraska Furniture Mart, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway and the largest independent furniture store in the country. The company was founded in 1937 by Rose Blumkin, a Jewish Russian immigrant who could not read, write, or sign her name. When she sold 80% of the company for $55million to Buffett in 1983, she signed the contract with an X.

A two-hour Q&A with Buffett followed at his global headquarters. The students asked questions about the economy, Buffett's investment methodology, and his value system. At lunch afterward, four UA students got to sit next to Buffett and ask questions while he was sipping his giant root beer float!

Buffett graciously took pictures with every student. The day ended with a tour of Borsheim's, an upscale luxury jewelry store and another subsidiary of Berkshire.

Several students have already thanked me for the experience. Many felt it was the most amazing experience they have ever had. This opportunity to meet Warren Buffett has not only enriched 27 University of Akron students and their professor, but also society as a whole, because we are educating everyone we meet about Buffett's keys to success and his values system.

It is my sincerest hope that the students will integrate Buffett's values into their own lives. This includes having a passion for what you do, living life with humility and integrity, respecting everyone you meet, and surrounding yourself with people who love you, care about you, and want you to become successful.

Thank you, Warren Buffett!

Dr. Todd A. Finkle is academic director of the Fitzgerald Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies and associate professor of management at The University of Akron.

http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/arti ... 283070.txt


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Buffett: Portrait of an Artist ( as a Young Shabbos Goy -- CSR   )
as a Young Man
Part 3
by Louis Corrigan (TMF Seymor)

(August 25, 1999) -- As Buffett has said, Berkshire Hathaway is his "canvas." What Lowenstein draws from this is that Buffett's obsessive creation of wealth is something like an ongoing artistic wager against mortality, an accumulation of fragments that Buffett can shore up -- with beautiful compounding interest -- against his inevitable physical ruin.

Indeed, aside from his relatively recent indulgence in a Berkshire corporate jet, there's little indication that Buffett cares for his money at all beyond the pleasure he has in accumulating it and the fact that it allows him to be independent enough to spend nearly all of his time making more. He lives in a modest home in Omaha in easy sight of a public street. He drives an old car. He maintains a modest office with a tiny staff.

Moreover, he has never sold any of his Berkshire stock, and as a result, he relegates very little of his personal income to charity (though he does give a percent of Berkshire profits to the charities designated by each individual shareholder). Still, it's not that he lacks a social conscience.

In 1969, Buffett applied to join Omaha's all-Jewish Highland Country Club. He wanted to use his acceptance there as a means of confronting the waspish Omaha Club, to which he already belonged, and inducing its members to admit Jews, who were then excluded. The same year, he and his business partner, Charlie Munger, underwrote the legal appeal to a California court case that proved a landmark victory for those seeking to legalize abortion. He has also personally financed the college education of many African-American students from Omaha.

But Buffett's spirit of self-reliance runs deep. He's also addicted to tangible returns and seems uncomfortable with the fact that much charitable giving doesn't translate clearly into bottom-line results. Still, since he also doesn't believe in leaving large sums of money to children (he favors an "enormous" inheritance tax), most of Buffett's money will go to his foundation when he dies.

Lowenstein believes that this apparent stinginess really goes back to a psychological need that the "canvas" is fulfilling for Buffett. His "fear of death has contributed to his drive to accumulate," Lowenstein suggests.

The mix of his talents and his circumstances has led Buffett, it seems, to thrive on a kind of Emersonian self-reliance and intellectual independence even as he desperately clings to continuity, as if the supremely self-confident person that he is might slip away if the various tissues holding his life in place vanished. Lowenstein describes him as childlike in his obsession, a man who is happiest poring over an annual report and always likely to have one handy.

But Buffett's intense focus also makes him incapable of recreating himself, and he is threatened by anything that might force him to do so. He's someone who in a sense needs to be sheltered both from many of the practical chores of life and from unnerving emotional entanglements. His genius needs its untethered space in which to flourish, and he's spent most of his adult life around people who would insure he got it.

Perhaps the most surprising example of his need for continuity is found in his personal life. According to Lowenstein, Buffett's wife Susie had long been his chief comfort and protector, handling all of the family matters, like buying a new car, that he simply took no interest in. In 1973, however, Susie decided to move to San Francisco to pursue a long-delayed career as a nightclub singer. With her three children grown and out of the house and Warren traveling a great deal to keep track of his investments, she simply wanted her own life. Buffett was mystified and devastated.

Soon after, however, it became clear that not so much had changed after all. He and Susie would still vacation together for weeks at a time. She would still talk to him almost daily. And to compensate for her absence from home, she encouraged women from her wide circle in Omaha to look in on him. That's how Buffett got to know Astrid Menks, a Latvian woman of 31 who traveled in Omaha's bohemian circles. Within the year Astrid had moved in with Buffett. And now, the two women both remain very much a part of his life. The three of them send out cards together and sit side by side in perfect harmony at Berkshire's famed annual meetings.

Buffett's investing has embodied this same spirit. "In a sense, his whole career has been an act of holding on -- of refusing to say goodbye," Lowenstein writes. Buffett has made a number of "lifetime" commitments to the companies he's invested in. When he bought into Capital Cities as part of its bid for ABC -- now part of Disney (NYSE: DIS) -- he signed over his proxy rights to CEO Tom Murphy as a sign of ultimate trust. Moreover, many of Buffett's greatest investments -- such as the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), Coca-Cola, and GEICO -- have marked personal returns of one kind or another, attempts to bring some earlier part of his life full circle.

Moreover, Buffett has always worked to educate those investing with him to see things as he does, to become long-term investors in Buffett. As a result, the Berkshire Hathaway shareowner meetings are like family reunions, with an air of community and continuity that Buffett obviously enjoys.

The point of all of this, really, is that Buffett's genius for long-term investing has something more than an intellectual rationale behind it. Yes, Ben Graham helped Buffett develop an investment framework that makes it easy for Buffett to serve as a counterpoint to an entire age, with its technical analysis, modern portfolio theory, efficient market theory, and now day trading.

But what Buffett shares with other remarkable but quite different investors -- such as George Soros -- is an understanding that an investment philosophy works best when it is deeply personal, a reflection of one's larger approach to the world. Buffett's success, then, might be partly chalked up to one great insight that any investor can follow: Know thyself, and invest accordingly.

http://www.fool.com/specials/1999/sp990824buffet3.htm