File photo: Warren Buffett (Picture credit: AP) Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors of all time, knows more about money than almost anyone else. But there was a time when he paid no heed when his wife told him about a missing credit card. Why did Berkshire Hathaway’s chairman stay cool?
When Warren Buffett’s wife lost her credit card
In 2014, during Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, billionaire Warren Buffett told an audience that his first wife had lost her credit card, and he made no attempt to retrieve it. The interviewer asked him, “Didn’t your wife lose her credit card? When did your first wife lose her credit card?”Buffett quickly recalled the incident. “Oh yeah, yes. When my first wife lost her credit card, I made no attempt to get it back,” he confirmed.So, why didn’t he? His response was quick: “Because the guy was spending less than she was.”The joke landed with laughter, at least at the time. It said something people used to believe about how women handle money. Buffett was at ease, in his element, playing to a crowd of powerful women by poking gentle fun at women’s spending habits. He wrapped the age-old belief in comedy: women spend too much money, while men spend mindfully. The humour rides on the common assumption about gender and money: that women are frivolous spenders while men are naturally cautious.Though what Warren Buffett delivered was a cliché husband joke, his relationship with his first wife, Susan Thompson, tells a different story. The couple exchanged wedding vows in 1952 and had three children together. She was not really the spender. She was an activist, a singer and a philanthropist who championed civil rights, women’s reproductive rights and access to birth control. She also served as a director of Berkshire Hathaway and owned roughly $3 billion in company stock by the time of her death in 2004.In fact, Susan was the driving force behind her husband’s charitable giving. In the documentary Becoming Warren Buffett, their son Howard explains the philosophical gap between his parents. Buffett always approached wealth as a competitive game. Susan, on the other hand, saw it as a tool that helped her do good. When he wanted to compound money indefinitely, Susan pressed him to give it away. “Susie didn’t want to wait as much as I did,” the billionaire recalled. “She never quite appreciated compounding like I did.” In other words, Susan cared more about solving crucial problems for people in need than about letting money grow exponentially.In 2014, the audience laughed at Buffett’s joke because it felt familiar. Now, a decade later, as the video resurfaces, the audience is reading it differently. Many felt Buffett was poking fun at the wrong person for the wrong reasons. “Oldest joke I know,” one user wrote. Another wondered whether Buffett was the original inventor of the joke: “I’ve seen someone else, a judge, I believe, use the same joke on TV.” Others still found it funny, while one user quipped, “What a rich guy thing to say.” Some wondered whether he was joking or not: “Is this purely a joke or did something like that actually happen?” Well, only Buffett knows!Warren Buffett, known as the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, has an estimated net worth of approximately $142.1 billion, making him the 11th-richest person in the world, according to Forbes. The majority of his fortune comes from his ownership stake in Berkshire Hathaway, which he has been managing for decades.