The Lemonade Life

I have everything I need. Writing the full first half now.

A root beer float and the most expensive lunch on eBay

Picture a small Italian restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska. It is 12:35 in the afternoon. An 87-year-old man walks in, orders a cheeseburger, and asks the waiter for a root beer float that comes out roughly twice the size a normal float should be. He sits down with a group of business school students, opens a can of Coca-Cola, and grins. "Berkshire owns a little over 8 percent of Coke," he tells them, "so we get the profit on one out of twelve cans. I don't care whether you drink it. Just open the cans, if you will."

That man is Warren Buffett. The restaurant is Piccolo's, one of his favorites, a place where he and Bill Gates once split a meal. And one of those students that day was Zack Friedman, the author of this book.

The day had started a few hours earlier, across town at Berkshire Hathaway headquarters. Buffett had met the group there for a long, unscripted morning of open questions. No prepared remarks. No moderator. Just an old man in an office who seemed genuinely pleased to be there. He had answered everything, posed for individual photos with every person in the room, and remembered names. By the time they moved to Piccolo's for lunch, he picked up the tab without ceremony and kept talking.

For context: two years before this meal, an anonymous bidder on eBay had paid $3,456,789 for a single lunch with Buffett at a New York steakhouse. On this particular afternoon, Buffett was hosting these students for free. No bodyguards. No assistants. Just an old man eating like a six-year-old, with an oversized root beer float and a cheeseburger, having what appeared to be the best afternoon of his week.