Carol J. Loomis - Tapdancing to Work

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

TAP DANCING TO WORK

C AROL J. L OOMIS is a senior editor-at-large at Fortune, where she has worked since 1954. She has been the magazines expert on Warren Buffett since 1966 and has edited his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaways shareholders since 1977. Her many honors include five lifetime achievement awards, including a Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism and Time Inc.s first-ever Henry Luce Award. This is her first book. She lives in Westchester County.

Tap Dancing
to Work

WARREN BUFFETT

ON PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING, 19662013:

A FORTUNE MAGAZINE BOOK

COLLECTED AND EXPANDED BY

CAROL LOOMIS

PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in the United States of America by Portfolio / Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012
This paperback edition with new material published 2013

Copyright 2012, 2013 by Time Inc.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

All of the articles (and excerpts from articles) in this book were published in Fortune magazine in the years 1966 through 2013.

Gates on Buffett (originally titled What I Learned from Warren Buffett) by Bill Gates.
Copyright 1995 Microsoft Corp. Originally published by the Harvard Business Review (January/February 1996 issue). Reprinted by permission of Microsoft Corp.

Letters from Chairman Buffett by Andrew Tobias. Originally published in Fortune magazine, issue of August 22, 1983. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Tap dancing to work : Warren Buffett on practically everything, 19662012 : a Fortune magazine
book / collected and expanded by Carol Loomis.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN: 978-1-101-60150-1
1. Buffett, Warren.2. Capitalists and financiersUnited States.3. Investments.I. Loomis, Carol.II. Buffett, Warren.III. Fortune.
HG172.B84T37 2012
332.6092dc23
2012036878

Designed by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To my family:
John R.;
Barbara, Tom, John T., and Grayson;
Mark, Steffi, Jenny, and Ben...
and
To that often intrusive, but
consistently interesting, part of my
life for nearly sixty years, Fortune.

Because I have long been the chief writer about Warren Buffett at Fortune, which for decades has covered him more closely than any other business publication, I have often been asked whether Im not going to branch out and write a Buffett biography. I have always said no, sure beyond a doubt that a writer who is a good friend of the subject does not make a good biographer. And I have indeed been a close friend of Warrens for more than forty years, a shareholder in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, for almost that long, and the pro bono editor of his annual letter to shareholders for thirty-five. All of those facts can be accommodated in my Fortune articles about Buffett, simply by my informing the reader that they exist. But they are not a firm base for a wide-ranging personal and professional biography, in which there should be considerable distance between writer and subject. Its absence in this case settled the question.

But then it dawned on me that the scores of Buffett articles we have published in Fortune are in themselves a business biographyand a perfect one for a book. Here you have it: Tap Dancing to Work, the description that Buffett has long applied to his love for running Berkshire. This book is a collection, arranged chronologically for the most part, of all our big articles about Warren (plus some shorter, lighter ones like Are Jimmy and Warren Buffett Related?). For each of the big stories Ive written an introduction or commentaryabout forty of them in total. These paragraphs explain, for example, whats particularly important about the story, what Warren forecast that did or didnt come true, what he thinks today about the storys main point. Overall, the books material covers a large chunk of historyforty-seven yearsan important span of time not only for Buffett but for the U.S. economy in which he has so successfully operated. (Hmm, forty-seven years, Buffett would be inclined to say. Thats a long timealmost one-fifth of the years the U.S. has existed.)

The articles and excerpts in this book were for the most part written by me and about forty other Fortune journalists (including three, John Huey, Rik Kirkland, and Andy Serwer, who rose to managing editor, with John subsequently moving still higher to the post of Time Inc.s editor-in-chief). But the authors also include Buffett himself, who wrote three important stories expressly for us and inserted think-piece sections into his annual letters that we lifted out and made into stories. Also represented is that well-known business writer Bill Gates.

In content as well as authors, this book is enormously diverse. We had the good sense along the way not to repeat ourselves too much, and when we did, I normally edited out the repetition. Actually, not repeating ourselves was pretty easy, because Warren kept doing new things.

When you finish this book, you will have seen the arc of Warrens business life. The first story in which we ever mentioned him was in 1966. He got one sentence then in an investing piece I wrote about another man (Alfred Winslow Jones) and in which I misspelled Buffettgiving it only one t. I will try, however weakly, to pardon myself for that by saying that outside Omaha (where a few investors knew Warren well because he was making them rich) he was in 1966 pretty much unknown. Jump to the early 1980s, and he hadnt gained much ground. When