Warren Buffett is a terrible bore

published 12 December 2005

I've never been a great fan of Warren Buffett. I know he's made a lot of people rich and I know he is generally considered to be the greatest investor of all time. But something about his plain-speaking, home town-living, wise-cracking, coke-swigging image just grates with me. I suppose I don't really believe he lives in Omaha, that he practically lives off Sees Candies and Cherry Coke, or that he is particularly witty. Still, not being one to make snap judgements, in the interests of fairness I left London last Thursday and arrived in Omaha, Nebraska to attend the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting and assess the situation properly.

I'd like to say that I warmed to Buffett over the weekend, but I'm afraid it just wouldn't be true. This is partly down to the fact that Omaha is less a town than a collection of highways, low-grade steak houses and Berkshire Hathaway-owned retail warehouses, and that the Omaha Comfort Inn is the worst hotel I've ever stayed in (I am, by the way, more convinced than ever that Buffett doesn't really live there). But it's mainly because the shareholders meeting is such a tedious event.

Great play is made in the press every year about how witty and insightful Buffett and his sidekick Charlie Munger are at the meeting, but having witnessed the event I'm beginning to rather suspect that most journalists spend their days not in the press box listening, but in the Omaha Hilton bar drinking. And for good reason. Most of the day is taken up with a lengthy question and answer session. Shareholders get up one by one and praise Buffett for making so many of them rich ("Mr. Buffett, thanks for your wisdom", "Mr. Buffett, thank you for doing so much for all of us"). Then they ask a question. The questions generally aren't that different from the praise, in that they tend to focus on Buffett's brilliance ("Mr. Buffett, can you tell us what it is that makes you so uniquely successful?") and the answers from Buffett focus on the same ("hard work", in case you're interested).

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Once a year a child asks a question, but even this provides no respite. On Saturday, it was asked by a high-voiced little girl in the form of a meaningless poem: "To come here we had to fly, do you think Petro China is at an all-time high? For my future job, can I be a taster of Sees Candy? My sister and I will work for free." Anyone who survives this without heading for the airport and the normal world is invited to retire to said retail warehouses to be overcharged for jewellery and furniture. It just wasn't for me. And as for the coke and candies Buffett sipped a little at a Coke during the meeting, but he certainly wasn't swigging and I didn't see him eat a single candy.

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast - but still writes for Moneyweek monthly.

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.