IT TAKES millions to have lunch with someone who controls billions. A bidder agreed to pay $US2.1 million ($2.2 million) to have lunch with the billionaire Warren Buffett, more than triple last year's record for the annual charity auction.
The winner, Zhao Danyang, a general manager at Pure Heart China Growth Investment Fund, won the right to dine with the 77-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc after a five-day auction on eBay.
The proceeds will benefit the Glide Foundation, a non-profit group in San Francisco that helps serve poor and homeless people.
After bidding started at $25,000, a battle broke out between two bidders in the final stretch of the auction, with bids jumping seven-fold in two hours.
Last year's winners, including Mohnish Pabrai, an investor of Irvine, California, who models his investment style on Mr Buffett's, dined with the tycoon at a steakhouse in New York last week.
Mr Pabrai, who bid for five years before being the top bidder, and Guy Spier, a friend who runs the Aquamarine LLC hedge fund, paid a then record $650,100 to dine with Mr Buffett.
Mr Zhao could not be reached for comment.
An eBay spokeswoman said the bid was among the highest priced items ever up for auction on the service and was the most expensive charity bid in its history, topping the $2.1 million price paid for a letter to the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Mr Buffett, who has transformed Berkshire from a failing textile maker into a conglomerate with a market value exceeding $168 billion, has pledged most of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities. The magazine Forbes this year estimated his net worth at $62 billion.
Mr Buffett began donating the lunches in 2000, after his wife Susan introduced him to Glide and its affiliated church. The auctions have raised more than $4 million for Glide since moving to the web in 2003.
Glide's annual budget is about $12 million.
It was Mr Buffett's ninth annual auction to benefit Glide, and the fourth consecutive time the winning bid set a record. Nine bidders placed 78 offers over the five days last week.
A spokeswoman for Glide Foundation, Denise Lamott, said a group of the charitable fund's employees, board members, donors and others gathered to watch the results at a San Francisco hotel. "There were screams, shouts," Ms Lamott said.
Mr Buffett will entertain Mr Zhao and seven companions at a New York steakhouse and answer virtually any question except what he is buying and selling. He praised Glide, which provides services including job training, medical care and 750,000 meals a year to the poor.
"It takes people who've hit bottom and brings them back," Mr Buffett said in an interview before sitting down last week with last year's winners.
Bloomberg
