巴菲特英文介绍

1、Hes just like you and me, except for the £31bn fortunePROFILE: Warren BuffettWhen F Scott Fitzgerald observed that “the very rich are different from you and me”, the novelist was clearly not thinking of people like Warren Buffett. Proclaimed the worlds richest man last week, the American invest

2、ment strategist eats at his local grill and drives to work from the modest home that he bought in unfashionable Omaha, Nebraska, in 1958, which is today valued at about £350,000. Such is the frugality of the 77-year-old “sage of Omaha”, whose wealth increased by £5 billion last year to

3、63;31 billion, that when he married in 2006 he bought a discount ring from his own jewellery company. He has vowed to pass on only a small chunk of his fortune to his children, Susie, Howard and Peter. He wants them to have “enough to do anything but not to do nothing”. His advice has enriched more

4、investors than anyone else in history, but Buffett pays himself a mere £50,000 a year and prefers such ordinary fare as steaks and hamburgers, washed down with Cherry Coke. Not for him the bright lights of New York, even though he owns a private jet, his one extravagance: “I have everything I n

5、eed and am very comfortable right here at home in Omaha. I feel sorry for people who are consumed by possessions.” Known for his wry homilies, Buffett has bet his house in jest against that of his friend and bridge partner Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder now relegated from first to third place

6、in the zillionaire stakes, according to Forbes magazine. They used to meet for games at a Holiday Inn near Buffetts home, but of late they play online - Buffetts only concession to newfangled technology - under the user names “T-bone” (Buffett) and “Challenger X”. Buffetts ranking may seem puzzling,

7、 given that in 2006 he announced he was donating his fortune to charity, with about £15 billion going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, dedicated to combating Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. The donations are in instalments - the latest for £880m - but Buffett just gets richer. Thi

8、s act of philanthropy was an indirect consequence of Buffetts unorthodox role as a husband and lover. In 1952 he married Susan Thompson, a former cabaret singer who, after raising their children, announced in 1977 that she was leaving Omaha to pursue her singing career in San Francisco. They remaine

9、d married and on good terms, holidaying together and helping charitable groups. Buffett had always expected that Susan would inherit his wealth and pass it to charitable causes, he explained later: “When we got married, I told Susie I was going to be rich . . . not because of any special virtues of

10、mine, but simply because I was wired at birth to allocate capital.” Susie was less than thrilled by this prospect: “But we were totally in sync about what to do with it - and that was to give it back to society.” In 1978 Susan introduced her husband to Astrid Menks, a Latvian working as a waitress i

11、n a restaurant, who soon moved in with him. Buffett sent out Christmas cards signed “Warren, Susie and Astrid”. Two years after Susan died from a stroke in 2004, Buffett married Astrid, then 60. “Astrid loves him and takes care of him,” his daughter Susie said. “If Warren didnt have a cent shed stil

12、l be with him.” Just before their wedding, he revealed his plan to release his ever-growing riches to charitable causes for decades to come. Buffett likes to make wealth-generation sound simple. He once summed it up thus: “Rule No 1: never lose money. Rule No 2: never forget rule No 1.” His prescien

13、ce is world-renowned: he refused to buy stocks in the booming 1960s, only to strike gold in the plummeting 1970s. He walked away from the dotcom boom in the 1990s, sticking with boring blue-chips such as Gillette, Coca-Cola and American Express. He always came up smelling of greenbacks. He is one of

14、 the most respected voices in financial America, embodying Midwest virtues of probity, modesty and common sense, so his recent warning that America was in recession stirred panic. His utterances attract 20,000 acolytes to the annual meeting of his business empire, dubbed the “Woodstock of capitalism

15、”. A journalist who attended recalled: “He was amiable, chatty, and spoke for four hours off the top of his head. He is what he seems: a modest and ferociously bright man to whom money is an intellectual pursuit, not something to spend.” Buffett is a Democrat who has funded the pro-choice group Plan

16、ned Parenthood and has raised money for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, rivals for the partys presidential nomination, without endorsing either. He would be happy whichever won, he said. Yet he remains a close friend of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Californias Republican governor, whom he served as

17、 an economic adviser in 2003. If anything gives him sleepless nights, it is the certainty that a nuclear holocaust will wipe out the planet. “It is the ultimate depressing thing. It will happen, its inevitable,” he said, reasoning that as the number of “bad guys” increases, so do the odds of one obt

18、aining an atom bomb. He was born in 1930 in a house in Omaha on the banks of the Missouri River, the son of Leila and Howard, a Republican stockbroker elected to Congress on a platform described as “to the right of God”. His grandfather ran the familys grocery store dating from 1869, where Buffetts

19、fortune began. “My grandfather would sell me Wrigleys chewing gum and I would go door to door around my neighbourhood selling it,” he recalled. “He also sold me a six-pack of Coca-Cola for a quarter 25c and I would sell it for a nickel 5c each, so I made a small profit.” He supplemented his earnings

20、 by selling lost golf balls. When the family moved to Washington, the 12-year-old Warren took on five paper rounds, using his access to customers to sell them magazine subscriptions. By the following year he was making £80 a month, an incredible sum in the 1940s. Through shrewd investment, at t

21、he age of 14 he saved the £400 needed to buy 40 acres of local farmland, which he rented out. His first dabble in the stock market earned him a $2 profit before the shares shot up, teaching him that patience pays off. After a first degree at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, he went to Columb

22、ia Business School in New York, where he fell under the spell of Benjamin Graham, an investment guru who awarded Buffett the only A+ grade he ever bestowed. Buffett worked for his mentor after graduation but outgrew him, according to Roger Lowenstein, Buffetts biographer: “Graham would amaze the sta

23、ff with his ability to scan a page with columns of figures and pick out an error. But Buffett was faster at it.” His strategy was to search for “cigar butt” companies, no longer of interest to the market and thus undervalued, but which still had “a few puffs” left in them. In 1962 he spotted a run-d

24、own Massachusetts textile firm, Berkshire Hathaway, which he bought and transformed into an insurance company. His empire now extends to sweet shops and Fruit of the Loom clothing. He has shares in The Washington Post, Tesco and a controlling stake in CE Electric, which supplies energy to 3.7m Engli

25、sh homes. He denounced the “outright crookedness” of Enron, the collapsed American conglomerate, and the dubious methods used by corporations to calculate pension charges and stock option costs: “CEOs will be respected and believed . . . only when they deserve to be. They should quit talking about some bad apples and reflect instead