Fraquezas e obsessões de Warren Buffett

the plain facts of his young character assemble themselves into something like a portrait of a universal loser--and yet right from the start Buffett himself seems to have been able to believe that the universe was wrong and he was right

Respeitado pela sua visão de longo prazo e virtudes morais, como por exemplo ser um bilionário de hábitos espartanos e fiéis à sua origem em Nebraska, parece que Buffett não gostou do perfil psicológico que Alice Schroeder, autora da biografia-tijolo 'The snowball: Warren Buffett and the business of life' (960 páginas!) traçou dele. O super investidor não imaginava que Schroeder iria além da sua carreira e mergulharia na psique, desde a formação de sua personalidade até pequenas fraquezas e desvios.

No momento em que o Berkshire Hathaway, fundo de Buffett amarga perdas de 35%, bem maiores que a média do índice S&P 500, Michael Lewis aproveita o livro e a atual berlinda do biografado para escrever uma longa e saborosa resenha, que ou abre o apetite sobre a obra ou, para quem não quer saber todos os detalhes da enfadonha vida pessoal de Buffett, o sacia.

As perguntas que ficam: vale a pena ser um bilionário de interesses estreitos e uma dieta de hambúrgueres? Será que, para quem parece gostar tão pouco de aproveitar a vida, os incômodos da fama e os sacrifícios do sucesso não superam os benefícios?

Outros trechos:

He confines himself to the diet of an eight-year-old, refusing to eat anything much beyond spaghetti, hamburgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Schroeder describes a bizarre scene in which Katharine Graham escorted Buffett to dinner at the Manhattan apartment of Sony Chairman Akio Morita. Japanese chefs served plate after plate that Buffett left completely untouched. "By the end of fifteen courses, he still had not eaten a bite," writes Schroeder (...)

As Schroeder puts it, "he tended to extrapolate mathematical probabilities over time to the inevitable (and often correct) conclusion that if something can go wrong it eventually will." This habit of mind informed not just his investment decisions but also much else--for instance, his obsession with nuclear proliferation. In Buffett's mind, it is not a question of if but when a nuclear bomb explodes in a big city, and the goal should be not to prevent it but to reduce the odds, and put the terrible day off for as long as possible (...)
Finally, and most critically, Schroeder stresses Buffett's obsession with money, which he famously views less as a unit of exchange than a store of value. Kay Graham once asked him for a dime to make a phone call and Buffett, finding only a quarter in his pocket, went off to make change. In telling the tale of Buffett's rise, Schroeder returns over and over to his pathological stinginess.

Dica: Marginal Revolution
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