A steakhouse lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffett sold for $1.68 million in an online auction to benefit a San Francisco charity, trailing last
year’s record of $2.1 million. The winner chose to remain anonymous. The auction consisted of 10 bidders and 116 bids, according to EBay Inc. The Glide Foundation, a San Francisco-based charity where Buffett’s late wife volunteered, will receive all proceeds from the event. The auction winner and as many as seven friends get to sit down for lunch with Buffett, gaining a chance to ask questions of the famed investor known as the “Oracle of Omaha.†The auction has raised more than $5.92 million for Glide over the past decade, helping the foundation offer food, clothes, shelter and health care to the needy. “To have someone like Warren Buffett, who has such a high level of intellect support your cause, is an unbelievable endorsement,†said Willa Seldon, chief executive of Glide, in an interview at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, where the foundation was hosting a party. Bidding for the lunch on the EBay auction site began on June 21, with the final bids broadcast last evening on two screens at the Hilton. The party was on the 46th floor, overlooking downtown, and featured wine, snacks and speeches from Seldon and Reverend Cecil Williams, Glide’s founder. Bidding surpassed $1 million about 45 minutes before the auction closed. Winners typically wait a year before having their lunch meeting. “For now the winner wants to stay anonymous,†said Tod Thorpe, an associate director at Glide. The group will announce the name “as soon as that changes if it changes,†he said. Buffett, the 78-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc., met on June 24 with last year’s winner, hedge fund manager Zhao Danyang of Hong Kong, at the Smith & Wollensky restaurant on Third Avenue in Manhattan. Zhao said he quizzed Buffett for three hours over lunch about commodities, the importance of corporate governance and the role of central governments in stabilizing currencies. “What I gained from that meeting was immeasurable,†said Zhao. He said his fund’s 600 percent return over the past six years was made possible by an investment strategy he learned from reading about Buffett. Welcome to the land of long-haired hippies, obese singing and … Union Budget is often more exciting on Dalal Street than the B-day itself. Payments are soon likely to be a matter of waving your phone before an NFC. Affordable housing has given residential segment a leg up. Weddings are no longer about just exchanging rings but about creating fantasies. A vast majority of equity fund investors try to time their entry and exit.
This represents first outflow from emerging markets funds since March