As the subtitle suggests, the book not only about the snowballing of Buffett's wealth, but about 'the business of life' as he sees it. In both spheres, his basic principle is to behave according to his 'Inner Scorecard', doing what he feels to be correct, rather than using the 'Outer Scorecard' and measuring himself by the opinions of others.
Unlike the recently disgraced Wall Street tycoons, he is indifferent to the trappings of wealth; even when he succumbed to buying a private jet for his frequent business trips, he named it 'the Indefensible'. Thrifty and defiantly unsophisticated, he consumes only burgers, fries and cherry Coke: 'If a three-year-old doesn't eat it, I don't eat it.' His rules of investment are straightforward: distrust debt; build in a margin of safety; be in there for the long term; don't invest in something you don't understand.
Surely anyone could do that, so why is there only one Warren Buffett? The answer is that it demands a resolute independence of mind that eludes other investors. Buffett was derided for his refusal to participate in the dotcom boom, but maintained a dignified silence until he was eventually proved right. As early as 2003, he was warning that the derivatives behind the current credit crunch were 'weapons of financial mass destruction'; he is now buying at rock bottom prices.
His financial career began at the age of 14, when he filed his first tax return, having saved $1,000, helped by earnings from his paper round. At 26, when he set up his first investment partnership for family and friends, he had $174,000. At the end of last year, his personal fortune was $60bn and Berkshire Hathaway, his holding company, was valued at $200m.
But his record has not always convinced economists and, in the mid-Eighties, a group of them came up with the idea of the 'Efficient Market Hypothesis', according to which Buffett simply shouldn't exist, because he confounded their central belief that no investor can consistently outperform the market. His success, they said, could only be explained by chance. Buffett pointed not only to his own record, but also to consistent out-performance by eight of his peers, all of them disciples of two earlier investment gurus, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd; the economists scurried away and modified their theory.
Buffett's thinking was shaped by two early influences: the Great Depression (he was born in 1930) and his corrosive relationship with his mother Leila. Apart from her, four women loom large in his life: his first wife Susie; her successor Astrid; Katharine 'Kay' Graham, the queenly publisher of the Washington Post; and Rose Blumkin, who arrived in the US from Russia as a penniless immigrant and went on to build the biggest furniture store in North America. He managed his intense focus on investment by outsourcing his personal, family and social life to his wives, extracting selfless devotion.
Even after decades of emotional neglect, Susie only left after handing him on to Astrid. Kay Graham was ring-mistress of his social world, though Buffett remained ill at ease with her dinner guests, and if the equally unworldly Astrid came along, she did so in a thrift store dress. His comment on meeting the late Diana, Princess of Wales, was: 'She was not as easy to talk to as Dolly Parton.' Yet when porn star Asia Carrera called him her hero on her website, he was thrilled.
As for Rose Blumkin, the redoubtable old tycoon was a role model. After Buffett bought her business, he realised he would have to persuade her to sign an agreement not to compete with him - at the time, she was aged 103. He took this as an example and often says that he, too, plans to work until that age.
The excesses of the plutocracy on Wall Street and in the City over the past 10 years were profoundly alien to Buffett, who unfashionably believes that moral rectitude has a financial value. He campaigned for an increase to inheritance tax in the US because he believes the rich owe a debt to society and that their children should not be automatic winners of the 'Ovarian Lottery'.
As a billionaire lecturing others on financial morality, he has been accused of hypocrisy. His stern views on the 'Ovarian Lottery' have led him to behave chillingly towards his siblings and even his children, only grudgingly bailing them out of financial problems. Two years ago, he wrote an ice-cold letter to Nicole Buffett, the adopted daughter of his son Peter, telling her: 'I have not legally or emotionally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or cousin.'
The Warren Buffett who emerges from these pages is unorthodox, honest, gifted and, in many ways, admirable. As an investor, he is a colossus. In the business of life, however, one suspects that this complex man has rather a lot of debits, as well as credits, on his personal balance sheet.
