The man sits alone in a room, on the fourteenth floor of a gray building. The man’s suit, his hair, the sky through the window, and the rows of figures sliding across the abacus of his mind—these too are gray, though each gray is of a different value. Against the wall stand rows of files containing data from the fifty-odd years of solitary roomsitting. The man drinks cola. He reads the paper.
Every so often the phone rings and the man answers. Usually the answer is “no.” Long ago the man concluded that such quietude was optimal for making money. “Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior,” he once wrote. By “intelligent,” he meant “profi table.” Over time this intuition was confirmed. The man is the richest in the world, except for certain years when he
is the second richest. “If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life,” is the example he once gave of how much his money could buy, if what he wanted was money to spend. But the man would rather stay in his room and watch his heap of money grow.
The man visits the same restaurant and orders the same steak. He goes home to the same house. He plays bridge on the Internet. Every other week the man—his name is Warren Buffett—rides the elevator down to the basement of the gray building, where, in a tiny barbershop, he receives the same haircut. In lieu of the room on the fourteenth floor, now off-limits to most visitors, the barber chair where he sits has become a kind of shrine.
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