Over the end credits of the new HBO
documentary “Becoming Warren Buffett,” we hear the incongruous sound of Buffett
singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” in a cracking voice. It’s a nod to a
moment, earlier in the film, when Buffett’s daughter, Susie, says that she has
a sweet spot for the song because her father used to sing it to her when she
was a little girl. And, while it might seem like an odd way to end a film about
the world’s most famous investor, it’s actually surprisingly fitting. The
documentary, which was made with the coöperation of Buffett and his family,
deals with Buffett the businessman and investor, but it’s Buffett the man and
his complicated, and often difficult, relationships with the people he loved
most that are the film’s real subject.
We
are still treated to the greatest hits of Buffett’s business career. We hear
about his early entrepreneurial endeavors—selling soda and gum door to door,
delivering five hundred papers a day—as well as about his love of numbers and
his interest, from a very young age, in the stock market. Buffett describes his
discovery of Ben Graham, one of the fathers of value investing, from whom he
learned the idea of buying “cigar butts”—companies that are on their last legs
but are nonetheless so undervalued by the stock market that you can still make
money off them (as you can get one last puff from a discarded cigar butt). And
we get a picture of his partnership with Charlie Munger, who was instrumental
in moving Buffett from buying bad businesses at cheap prices to buying great
businesses—most famously, Coca-Cola—for reasonable prices, a move that was the
foundation of his immense fortune.
But
what makes “Becoming Warren Buffett” far more interesting than a simple
hagiography is the exploration of Buffett’s personal life, and, in particular,
his relationship with his first wife, Susan, who died in 2004. Personal
relationships were not something that Buffett navigated naturally. At one point
in the movie, he says, “I don’t have a mind that relates to the physical
universe very well,” and the same seems to have been true of the emotional
universe. Buffett, by his own description, was socially awkward as a kid (he
attributes much of his later success to taking a Dale Carnegie public-speaking
course as a young man), and the film is a portrait of a person for whom
financial questions “are easy,” as Buffett says. “It’s the human problems that
are the tough ones.”
In
some ways, Buffett was the archetypal absent-minded professor, so locked inside
his own head that he wasn’t always aware of what was going on around him. (He
says he doesn’t recall the color of the walls of his bedroom or his living
room.) This could be hard on the people around him. “Physical proximity with
Warren doesn’t always mean he’s there with you,” Susan says, in an old “Charlie
Rose” interview. His children reiterate this sentiment. His son, Howard, says
that it’s difficult to connect with Buffett on an emotional level, “because
that’s not his basic mode of operation.” Susie, his daughter, says that you had
to speak to him in sound bites, because if you went on for too long you would
“lose him to whatever giant thought he has in his head at the time.”
To
some degree, Buffett’s cerebral, inward nature seems to have been there from
the start. But the film also suggests, gently, that it may have been amplified
by his family life when he was a boy. Buffett’s father—whose portrait still
hangs on the wall of his son’s office at Berkshire Hathaway—was, by his
account, a great dad, affectionate and inspirational. “The best gift I was ever
given was to have the father I had when I was born,” Buffett says. But his
mother, who was brilliant and ambitious, was another story. She was plagued
with chronic headaches, and, Buffett says, “You didn’t want to be around her
when she was having the headaches. She would lash out.” Buffett’s sister Doris
is more blunt, saying that she remembers “being terrified” of her mother. “When
I’d wake up in the morning, I’d listen to hear her voice. I could tell by her
voice if it was going to be a terrible day or not.” It hardly seems like a
stretch to speculate that Buffett’s emotional reserve might have been, in part,
a reaction to the turmoil at home.
But
Buffett has, over the years, pushed back against that reserve, and the movie
examines him as a man trying, haltingly but successfully, to open himself up to
the world and let more of it in. Buffett attributes this effort almost entirely
to his first wife: “I was a lopsided person. She put me together.” Susan moved
away from Omaha (where Buffett has lived for more than sixty years) in 1977,
but the two of them remained close (and never divorced), and she helped to
orchestrate his relationship with Astrid Menks, whom he married after she died.
Susan—who is in some senses the real star of the documentary—seems to have been
the driving force behind Buffett’s evolution as a person. She’s the one who got
him interested in civil rights and feminism, who pushed him to become more of a
public figure and to give more of his money away before during his lifetime.
(Buffett, with his love of compound interest, wanted to pile it up and then
donate it after he died.) The paradox of the movie’s title is that, in order to
become “Warren Buffett,” the avuncular, modest figure who’s the anti-Trump,
Buffett needed in many ways to stop being himself, or at least to stop being
the self that came most naturally.
There’s another paradox the film hints at,
too: the qualities that made it challenging for Buffett to deal with people are
the very qualities that made him such a brilliant investor. This is more subtle
than just the fact that Buffett loved numbers so much. In fact, his true genius
isn’t just his ability to identify undervalued companies; it’s his ability to
buy and hold onto those companies through the inevitable fluctuations that all
markets experience. That’s not just about insight. It’s also about an ability
to divorce yourself from emotion, to be rational at a time when other people are
acting irrationally, and to be calm when others are fearful.
On
the walls of the Berskhire offices, framed front pages from days of market
panic, like the 1929 financial crash, serve as a reminder not to succumb to the
passions of the moment. That’s something that all investors know they’re
supposed to do. But actually being able to do it, being able to buy when
everyone else is screaming, “Sell,” and not to buy when everyone is telling you
to do so, is a very hard thing for most of us. For Buffett, it seems to have
been as natural as breathing. But it’s not difficult to see how that
hyperrationality, that ability to divorce yourself from what’s going on around
you, might also make it difficult truly to connect with the events of everyday
life, which happen, after all, in the moment. Buffett was born to be great at
investing. He had to work really hard to be good at living.