Warren Buffett and the Omaha Oracle

Every spring, roughly forty thousand people fly into Omaha from around the world to attend a shareholder meeting. They fill the CHI Health Center arena to hear an eighty-something man from Nebraska answer questions for six hours. There are no slides, no video presentations, and almost no security. People line up at four in the morning to get good seats. This has been going on for decades.

Warren Buffett was born in Omaha in nineteen thirty. He bought his first stock at age eleven, declared his first taxes at thirteen, and bought a small textile company called Berkshire Hathaway in nineteen sixty-five. Berkshire no longer makes textiles. It is now a holding company worth more than a trillion dollars that owns significant stakes in dozens of American businesses, from insurance companies to railroads to consumer brands. Buffett has run it from the same modest office in Omaha for his entire career, refusing to move to New York or any of the financial centers where his peers eventually clustered.

The decision to stay in Omaha was deliberate. Buffett has said repeatedly that distance from Wall Street helped him think clearly. Away from the noise of the trading floor and the social pressure of the financial district, he could read annual reports and think about businesses on their own terms. The geography of the Great Plains, it turned out, was not a disadvantage.

Buffett's presence transformed Omaha's self-understanding. A city that had built its identity on cattle and railroads found itself hosting the world's most famous investor in a nondescript office building off Dodge Street. He still eats breakfast at McDonald's. He still lives in the house he bought in nineteen fifty-eight for thirty-one thousand five hundred dollars. The meeting every May is something between a religious revival and a traveling circus, and it is entirely, improbably, Nebraska.