Last year you made your big announcement about giving away all your money. Is that decision sitting well with you or do you ever wake up in the night and think, "What have I done?"
No, I sleep like a baby. It's worked out perfectly for me. It's exactly what I wanted to do in terms of where the money goes, it's the people I want to have making the decisions, it fits well with what I want for Berkshire Hathaway, so I wouldn't change an item in it.
You gave the money to five foundations, the largest amount going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but was there ever a Plan B? I heard you muse once that you could afford to hire 10,000 artists to paint your picture every day for the rest of your life. You were joking, of course, but was there ever something else you had in mind?No. I originally thought that my wife would outlive me, she was younger than I was, and women live longer than men and all of that, so I thought that was likely, and in that case she actually would have made the decision. I mean, the money would have gone to what was then called the Buffett Foundation -- now called the Susan Buffett Foundation -- so she would really have been in charge of the disposition. But when she died first, I had to make the decision. She loved giving away money, and she was good at it, and she was wise about people, so I had no worries at all about how she would have carried it out, but instead I had to carry it out, so there was no Plan B once she died first.
