Lunch with Warren Buffett goes on auction block one last time
Warren Buffett is set to end his annual lunch fundraiser, which has raised $47.3m for a California homeless organisation over the past two decades.
A steakhouse lunch with Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett will return to the auction block this June after the annual charity fundraiser was put on a two-year pause during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This will be the last time bidders can vie for a sit-down lunch with Mr Buffett, who has raised $US34m ($A47.3m) for a California homeless organisation over the past two decades with his Power of One event.
The most recent auction held before the pandemic, in 2019, got a record-setting bid of $US4.6m. That topped the previous record of $US3.46m in 2016.
This year will be the “grand finale” of the Power of One charity auction, according to a statement from Glide, the San Francisco homeless organisation that has partnered with Mr Buffett since the first event in 2000.
Glide made the announcement Monday, ahead of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting that starts April 30.
The online auction, run by eBay, will open for bids at 7:30pm. PST on Sunday, June 12. Bidding starts at $US25,000, and the auction will end at the same time on June 17.
The winning bidder can bring seven guests to dine with Mr Buffett at Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in New York City.
Glide was a favourite cause of Mr Buffett’s first wife, the late Susie Buffett. It offers free meals, healthcare and other services to homeless and low-income people in San Francisco.
Mr Buffett’s office referred questions about his decision to end the auction to Glide. The organisation said it will continue to work with Mr Buffett in different ways in the future Previous winners have included hedge-fund manager David Einhorn, who paid $US250,100 to dine with Mr Buffett in 2003 and donated another $US250,000 after the auction closed.
Guy Spier, who paid $US650,100 along with two others in 2007, wrote a book about how the insights he gleaned from Mr Buffett during the lunch helped his transformation from a Wall Street banker who called himself “brash, shortsighted and entirely out for myself” to a thoughtful value investor.
Former hedge-fund manager Ted Weschler spent more than $US5m for lunch two years in a row in 2011 and 2012. Soon after, Mr Buffett hired him as one of his two investment managers at Berkshire.
The Wall Street Journal
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