Has friendship of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett reached final act?

By Anupreeta Das

In the summer of 1991, Mary Gates, the mother of the Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, convinced her workaholic 35-year-old son to spend the July 4 holiday at Hood Canal, a location about two hours from Seattle that had long been the family getaway.
 

Warren Buffett, was among the guests. When Gates’ mother tried to introduce her son to Buffett, he brushed her off, saying that he didn’t want to meet a “stockbroker.” But the two men hit it off immediately. The two have been close friends ever since.

Once, recounting the story of their meeting to students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Gates called it an “unbelievable friendship.” Buffett quipped, “The moral of that is, listen to your mother.”
 

 

Theirs has been an unusual friendship. Over the next few decades, the two billionaires forged a bond based on free-flowing conversation and a mutual love of bridge, business, problem solving and philanthropy. 
 

In 2004, Gates joined the board of directors of Buffet’s giant conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, which Buffett described as an “act of friendship.” To do so, he had to step down from the board of Icos, the biotechnology company that developed Cialis and the only company other than Microsoft whose board he had been on. By then, Gates had stepped down as chief executive of Microsoft, although he remained its chairman. (In March 2020, Gates said he would step down from the boards of both Berkshire and Microsoft to focus more on his philanthropy.)
 

As Berkshire global shareholders made their pilgrimage to Omaha for the conglomerate’s annual meeting, they were delighted by the public displays of the pair’s friendship. 
 

But, even as their relationship blossomed, there remained some striking differences, most notably in how they displayed the trappings of their enormous wealth.
 

In addition to his modest home in Omaha, Buffett owned only a single vacation property, in Laguna Beach, California, that he bought for $175,000 in the early 1970s and has since sold. He has a 6.25 per cent interest in a Falcon 2000 operated by NetJets (a Berkshire company), he once told, adding, “And that’s about it.”
 

As the years progressed, certain aspects of his behavior, including Gates’ stewardship of his foundation, have upset Buffett, according to four people with insight into their relationship. For more than a decade, Buffett — known for his love of lean and efficient operations free of bureaucracy — had been bothered by what he saw as the bloat and inflated operating costs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the entity started in 2000 by Gates and his former wife, which is now known as the Gates Foundation.
 

In 2023, Buffett, whose donations to the foundation supercharged its philanthropy for decades, decided that upon his death, the remainder of his fortune — worth more than $100 billion — wouldn’t continue to go to the organisation.

In 2006, Gates Foundation gave away about $1.6 billion; by 2009, it projected it would have to make $3.2 billion worth of grants per year. Today, the foundation’s resources dwarf those of the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and other big global foundations. The Gates Foundation’s annual budget exceeds that of the World Health Organization.
 

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