Our American Popes: Director’s Cut

One ascends while one retires

(Editor’s Note: Hemingway once said that he wrote original drafts sober and then rewrote on bourbon. Your author, battling an unfortunate spring cold, composed the original draft of this post on NyQuil, resulting in several typos and sentences that defied logic, as well as grammar. These were addressed in this rewrite, during which the author was relatively sober. Your patience and attention is appreciated.)

---

We have an American pope! Born and raised in Chicago, a White Sox fan and a graduate of Villanova, whose basketball team is an NCAA perennial, Robert Prevost’s election caught me, and many others, by surprise. It routed the betting markets, where he was given a 1 percent chance of winning on Polymarket. We can only guess what was going on under all those pointy caps when the vote was cast. Time will tell.

Coincidentally, Pope Leo XIV succeeds the retirement of another American pope, or at least a secular version thereof. A man who has touched the lives of millions of Americans, spread the gospel of financial empowerment and free markets, championed for those long oppressed, spoke in compelling parables, and believes in, above all else, the virtues of honesty, loyalty and transparency.

We’re speaking, of course, about Warren Buffett, the Pope of Wall Street, who announced his retirement last week at the age of 94.

Buffett is an American original. At the young age of 11, he was already on the search for hidden value, combing through the trash cans at a local race track to look for place and show tickets that had been mistakenly thrown away and redeeming them. Even then, he had a nose for money. Famously, in 1965 he took control of a small textile company called Berkshire Hathaway. He began transitioning it into an insurance company and by 1985 had closed the last of its mills. The rest, as they say, is history.

And what a history it was. If any of us had invested $100 in Berkshire in 1965, when I was a 13-year-old delivering the Akron Beacon-Journal, it would be worth more than $5 million today (that same $100 invested in the S&P 500 would be worth $39,000). Buffett’s stock-picking prowess is legendary, but simple — look for well-managed companies with discounted value, then buy ‘em and hold ‘em. He did it over and over, once famously saying “Our favorite holding period is forever.”

Buffett bought on fundamentals — strong management, advantaged market position, good products — and then remained loyal. He has certain business standards, but they are rarefied compared to many of today’s investors. “Lose money for the firm and I will be understanding,” he said. “Lose a shred of reputation for the firm and I will be ruthless.”

Like Pope Leo, Buffett is a man of the people. He loves Cherry Coke (he holds Coca-Cola shares) and Dairy Queen (he bought the company in 1998). With those two investments, he famously joked, he and partner Charlie Munger had “put our money where our mouth is.” Berkshire’s annual meetings in Omaha are called a Woodstock for capitalists. Thousands attend each year. The highlight was the Q&A session with Warren and Charlie, but there are also the side shows, like the invitation-only event at Borsheims Jewelers in Omaha, in which Warren bought a majority share in 1988. (My wife’s mother bequeathed her Borsheims-purchased engagement ring to her, which Mary then had refashioned into her own engagement ring in 2023; we refer to it still as the “Borsheims diamond.”)

It’s too soon to tell what kind of social philosophy Pope Leo has (although we’ve had hints), but Pope Warren wasn’t shy about his, especially regarding taxes and wealth inequality. He often lamented the fact that he legally paid a lower income tax rate than his secretary; while he is a full-throated advocate of free markets, he also believes that income inequality should be balanced with more equitable taxes and a strong social safety net. “If anything, taxes for the lower and middle class and maybe even the upper middle class should even probably be cut further,” he once said. “But I think that people at the high end — people like myself — should be paying a lot more in taxes. We have it better than we've ever had it.”

True to his principles, Buffett has pledged to give away more than half of his $160 billion fortune before he passes away. As of 2023, he’d already distributed more than $50 billion, some of which has gone to a place close to my heart — Glide Memorial Church in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where I helped serve many Thanksgiving dinners.

He’s a champion of the underdog. In the excellent documentary “Becoming Katherine Graham” (Amazon Prime), we watch Buffett act as mentor to Graham when she anxiously and suddenly assumes the helm of The Washington Post after the tragic death of her publisher husband Phil Graham. Here’s how Warren described the relationship.

“Among the scores of brilliant and interesting women I’ve known is the late Katharine Graham, long the controlling shareholder and CEO of the Washington Post Co. Kay knew she was intelligent. But she had been brainwashed — I don’t like that word, but it’s appropriate — by her mother, husband, and who knows who else to believe that men were superior, particularly at business.

“I met Kay in 1973 and quickly saw that she was a person of unusual ability and character. But the gender-related self-doubt was certainly there too. Her brain knew better, but she could never quite still the voice inside her that said, ‘Men know more about running a business than you ever will.’

“I told Kay that she had to discard the funhouse mirror that others had set before her and instead view herself in a mirror that reflected reality. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘you will see a woman who is a match for anyone, male or female.’”

Despite his immense wealth, Buffett remains humble. “I buy expensive suits, they just look cheap on me,” he once said. Jeff Bezos has a yacht worth $500 million and sends his wife into space on a lark, Larry Ellison bought a Hawaiian island for $300 million and the Sultan of Brunei has a car collection valued at $5 billion. Warren still lives in the modest house he’s had in Omaha since 1958 (although he did buy a home in Laguna Beach in 1971 for $150,000, which he sold for $7.5 million in 2018; the man just can’t help making money). His one notable act of extravagance was the purchase of a private jet, which he bought in 1989 with $7 billion in Berkshire funds and christened “The Indefensible.” On second thought, he sold the plane in 1999 and has since flown on Berkshire’s service planes.

His philosophy of life, which he would share frequently, is not so far removed from the teachings of the first pope, Peter (although Warren declared himself an agnostic). “The only way to get love is to be lovable,” he said. “It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: 'I'll buy a million dollars worth of love.' But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.”

And this: “Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.”

Great spiritual leaders, like popes and priests, lift people up. Great secular leaders do the same, in different ways. Buffett lifted people up by making them wealthy and then by expanding that circle of wealth through his philanthropy. He did so on a rock of ethics and values, selflessness and discipline. There are other Buffetts out there, but none with the scale and longevity of Warren. He is, to quote William Carlos Williams, in the American grain — hard-working, opportunistic, self-aware, compassionate and humorous. Our American pope.