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This intimate London Business Forum event was held at the London School of Economics’ Hong Kong Theatre – a fitting place to hear about the world’s greatest living investor, Warren Buffett.

Providing insights into his remarkable life was Alice Schroeder, a former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and All-America Research Analyst, who had been handpicked by Buffett to be his biographer. Over the subsequent five years she spent more than 2,000 hours interviewing him, gaining unique insight into one of the business world’s most enigmatic figures. The resulting biography – The Snowball – is the first, and will be the last, biography to be researched with Buffett’s full agreement and assistance.

Schroeder began by setting the scene, painting a picture of Buffett as an idiosyncratic and often reclusive figure. He is, she argued, “Totally obsessed by the pursuit of money.” Not content with being the richest person in his home town, he dedicated himself to becoming the richest person in the United States, and then the world. Interestingly, Schroeder intimated that what his money could buy was of little interest to Buffett, it was the act of accumulation of wealth that was important. Indeed, his relationship with money was unusual in many senses. Schroeder recounted an obsession he formed with seeing his wealth in a physical form, which led him to purchase a huge quantity of solid silver bars. He would then visit the vault on regular occasions in order to be in close physical proximity.

With the audience’s interest spiked, Schroeder opened the session to an informal Q&A. Hands were quickly raised as attendees relished the opportunity to delve deeper into Buffett’s fascinating life. One delegate asked what could be learnt from Buffett’s phenomenal investment success and whether his results could be replicated. You can’t imitate him and there is no shortcut was Schroeder’s emphatic response. “Books that claim otherwise are selling false promises”. It took Buffett years of dedication and painstaking research to build up his encyclopaedic knowledge. Armed with this remarkable database he is able to make swift and decisive decisions on new investment opportunities in a way that no book could teach.

Another question focussed on Buffett’s relationship with his children and how this has been affected by his enormous wealth. Schroeder explained that he would rarely give his children money and did not want them to feel they could rely on his fortune. He even went so far as to give them the impression that they would not feature in his will. The way he handled money with his children, claimed Schroeder, “often left them feeling confused and insecure.” Indeed when he took them to the Cinema he might suddenly decide that they should buy their own tickets and popcorn, but they would not know until the final moment, giving them little or no sense of control over their finances.

In recent years, Buffett has given away vast sums of his fortune to charity. Interestingly, claimed Schroeder, he has chosen to not set up any foundations in his own name, meaning there will be no legacy once he passes away. Instead, he made his donation to the Bill Gates Foundation, with little to no control over where it goes or what causes it will assist. It seems that this side of things holds little or no interest to Buffett.

As the session was drawing to a close, Schroeder told a story outlining Buffett’s infamous single-mindedness and focus. She recalled that, during the biography interview process, he would insist on being home by a certain time each night to participate in an online bridge game. In order to be home for this, he would literally run from the car down his driveway to get to his computer in time. Once positioned in front of the game, everything else became irrelevant and he focused a ‘laser-like’ intensity on the game. This extreme focus was illustrated when a bat flew into his house one night to shrieks of despair from his wife. However, Buffett remained completely unmoved, keeping all of his attention on the computer screen. Once the bat had finally been cleared from the house, and under interrogation from his wife, he simply responded “Why did you let it bother you? It didn’t bother me.”

It’s rarely in life that we come across someone who truly breaks the mould. After this session delegates were left with little doubt that Buffett is such a man; they left with a copy of The Snowball eager to learn more.