The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

This is a epic book (6 months, but I got there!)...don't go reading it expecting to get a particularly deep insight into how Buffet went about becoming the richest man on Earth. But it's a good story and, assuming it's not massaging his image too much, then it's consoling that such a decent bloke could make it all the way to the top.

Abandoned at 35%. Went through from Warren's childhood through to his life in the early 1970s. This is a huge 800+ page book and unfortunately I'm not that interested in finance or Warren Buffet to want to read all of it.

Buffett gave the author the go-ahead to be brutally honest and it shows. The early pages don't paint a very flattering picture of him. He comes across like a manchild (if I'm being honest). He's very picky with his food, to the point where when he stays out of town at a friend's mum's place (and this is when he's an adult by the way) she cooks him hamburgers for breakfast (!) His wife was doing an amazing job of basically propping him up and allowing him to do the one thing he was good at. This singular focus on money though meant he wasn't really paying enough attention to his wife and kids.

Although he's super money-oriented he's also very concerned about what other people think of him and possibly some loyalty comes into play too. So he's not a complete dick to other people in his pursuit of money. e.g. he wouldn't fire an entire factory worth of people just to make a couple extra bucks. He also did (maybe grudgingly) let his wife spend some of his money, so he wasn't a completely stingy guy either.

Of course since I only got a third of the way in (and there are 40 more years of his life covered in the book, I'm assuming he did grow as a person and a lot more good points happened further on. e.g. he did force his town's country club to start allowing Jewish members.