Warren and Bill
Gates, Buffett, and the Friendship That Changed the World
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, and The Two Popes comes the fascinating account of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s friendship—one of the most impactful relationships in history, and the basis of an upcoming play and film.
Few friendships have had such far-reaching implications for the world—from finance to technology to philanthropy—than that between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. After meeting at a party in 1991, the two played cards and golf, shared jokes, swapped trade secrets, ate junk food, talked and listened. Their growing friendship would impact each man and lead to change on a grander scale, culminating in the development of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which holds nearly $50 billion in assets.
How did such an unusual union blossom? In what ways specifically did each man begin to influence the other? How did these two avid wealth accumulators jointly decide to address some of the world’s most critical problems—poverty, disease, inequality—by giving their wealth away? And what, finally, does their giga-wealthy partnership mean for the rest of us in an age of great wealth—and great inequality? This book gives the fullest account yet of this extraordinary relationship and explores how it has transformed these two men—and is changing the world for the better for all of us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Screenwriter McCarten (The Two Popes) struggles to stick to the facts in this unsatisfying dual biography focused on the friendship between investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates. The book's greatest strengths and weaknesses can be traced back to its origins as an unfinished stage play. It's easy to imagine how McCarten's fly-on-the-wall account of Buffet and Gates's first meeting, which takes place at a 1991 garden party hosted by Gates's mother, would have played out onstage. Gates, contemptuous of Buffet for trading "pieces of paper" instead of creating innovative products, grumps about until Buffet asks him how he would have built IBM from scratch, kicking off a legendary nerding-out session. Unfortunately, even McCarten's thorough research strains to support this level of novelistic detail, resulting in speculative passages about what Buffet felt as he sat beside his wife's deathbed in 2004 and what Melinda French thought of her now ex-husband when they first met at a corporate dinner. McCarten also strains to fulfill his goal of elucidating what the duo's "giga-wealthy partnership mean for the rest of us," delving into how the pair accumulated massive riches and established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation without making clear the effects of such actions on ordinary people. This falls short of its grand ambitions.
