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How Bill Gates Celebrated Warren Buffett's 90th Birthday (cnn.com) 40

The seventh-wealthiest man in the world, Warren Buffett, turns 90 today. Famously the tycoon/philanthropist pledged to give away 90% of his wealth, founding with Bill and Melinda Gates "The Giving Pledge," a campaign urging the world's wealthiest individuals to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Over $1.2 trillion has now been pledged, with participants including Elon Musk, Ted Turner, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Microsoft's other co-founder, Paul Allen.

CNN reports that Gates "offered a sweet and funny video tribute to his billionaire pal," who besides drinking six cans of Coke each day is also "a notorious dessert-a-holic." Doing his best Martha Stewart impression, and with Randy Newman's "You Got a Friend" playing in the background, Gates made a delicious-looking Oreo cake, complete with Buffett's face on the top, drawn in chocolate icing. In the end of the 60-second video, Gates cuts a slice, puts it on a plate with a fork, and leaves the message "Happy 90th birthday Warren" in Oreo dust...

The cake was a special tribute to Gates' friendship with Buffett. In 2016, Gates recounted a story on his blog about how he caught Buffett eating his favorite dessert for breakfast: Oreos. "One thing that was surprising to learn about Warren is that he has basically stuck to eating what he liked when he was six years old," Gates wrote. "I remember one of the first times he stayed at our house and he opened up a package of Oreos to eat for breakfast. Our kids immediately demanded they have some too. He may set a poor example for young people, but it's a diet that somehow works for him."

The editor of Forbes also joined the celebration: Next year will mark a decade for the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy, our annual meeting of 150 or so of the world's biggest givers and greatest problem-solvers. The impact is enormous, and it wouldn't happen without today's birthday boy, 90-year-old Warren Buffett. In 2011, I pitched the most generous philanthropist ever the idea of turning our definitive wealth ranking from a static list into a club for good. Warren being Warren, he embraced it immediately, strategically and wholeheartedly, and the Summit was born...

The highlight each year is a talk that Warren and I have, usually during lunch... For Warren's big birthday, we dug through nine years of Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy video archives to find some of his most inspiring and obscure gems, [each] edited down to 90 seconds or so. Happy Birthday, Warren!

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How Bill Gates Celebrated Warren Buffett's 90th Birthday

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  • Windows still sucks and Bill Gates was a dick, but he is now one of the good guys.

    • by Jarwulf ( 530523 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @05:40PM (#60456528)
      Nope, he's the same crafty machinating figure he's always been. Its just that he's at the stage where he's done buying ordinary things and now's buying sainthood. No doubt he does to a lot of good things...but on his terms as he wants it under his complete control nobody elses. Its less like donating in the ordinary sense and more like raining down changes on high like a player in Simcity. A lot of the stuff he does serves directly or indirectly political interests and generally tries to restructure society to operate as a top down technocracy with him at the top. I mean would we give a Republican as much credit if they remade society just like they wanted rather than in a way everybody could appreciate? Not to mention the money was generally bullied and stolen and withheld from others. Maybe if he was such a great guy he'd give back some of the money from the countless people he scammed it off of like Gary Kildall so that they could play the saint and get the glory he is hogging. Maybe he could give the money he is hiding under his charity to the IRS and lose control of it like ordinary people rather than being allowed extra cash to make himself look good. A lot of people close to Billy Boy remark as to how he is a calculating figure underneath the warm and in the past nerdy exterior he puts on. I have to agree. He's done a lot of good no doubt (and a lot of bad) but every move he's made would have been made by an extremely intelligent psychopath. I don't see why we should go too crazy praising him. Its like praising a bank robber who donated to an orphanage. Maybe things would have been even better if the rightful owners of all that cash were donating it to the causes they liked. He's got every hipster and talking head fooled by throwing a wad of money in their face.
      • Kildall has been dead for 26 years.

        All too often, the money of the founders of large charities is eventually turned to purposes that would horrify the founder. Gates wanting to control how his money is used is the act of a man who's learned something from history.

      • You speak as if you know absolutely nothing about Buffett or what he has done, but instead are merely projecting an ideological template upon whatever you look at. Nothing you said is even remotely applicable to Buffett or recognizable as reality.
      • Its just that he's at the stage where he's done buying ordinary things and now's buying sainthood.

        Good on him! Whether you buy sainthood with personal time and dedication, or by spending your wealth the population benefits. Actual saints also had the terms of how they helped other under their complete control. Nobody forced a saint to perform a miracle.

        Not to mention the money was generally bullied and stolen and withheld from others.

        Err hyperbole much. I guess you could say he "stole" his wealth from the opportunity cost of other CEOs. But hey if we're going to concentrate wealth we may as well do it by someone attempting to buy sainthood rather than burning it on hookers and blow or

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Xest ( 935314 )

        God the longer you open source zealots carry on this crusade against something that happened 20 years ago the more and more you look like complete and utter bitter losers.

        It's really not a good look, you need to get over it. Gates grew up and became a better person, the fact you lot can't just shows how utterly pathetic and hopeless you are.

      • How do you expect a charity to continue to exist if they don't make some profits? Giving them a lump sum means the work is finite and will eventually end.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday August 30, 2020 @05:24PM (#60456494)

    Billionaire A wishes Billionaire B something.
    Billionaire B has a shitty diet.
    The End.

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > drinking six cans of Coke each day

      1. Buy stock in junk food companies
      2. Tell everyone you drink 6 cans of Coke and eat McDonalds every day
      3. ???
      4. Profit

      I'm pretty sure step 3 is buying up health care stock and insulin producing companies.

      • > drinking six cans of Coke each day

        1. Buy stock in junk food companies 2. Tell everyone you drink 6 cans of Coke and eat McDonalds every day 3. ??? 4. Profit

        I'm pretty sure step 3 is buying up health care stock and insulin producing companies.

        Step three is eliminate all difficult to source ingredients and replace them with government subsidized corn syrup

    • Maybe we can save it by memeizing it. Jobs vs. Gates style.

    • Alternate take: Super nerdy billionaire bakes Oreo cake.

      That matters, because now I'm hungry.

  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 30, 2020 @05:53PM (#60456552)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by DogDude ( 805747 )
      That's only true in the US. When you're rich, it's very easy to get richer. When you're poor, it's extremely difficult.
    • It is amazing how disproportionate the relationship between the amount of time, energy, effort, resources, risk, skill and other things a person puts into acquiring wealth and the amount of wealth they acquire.

      It's the same even among regular folks. A good example is the property market in places like the UK (where I am). I took a lot of risk when I was younger and started a business. It went pretty well and we were able to earn above normal salaries, but if I'd just taken the money I'd put into the business and bought a house where I lived at the time, I would have made far more (and it would all be tax free). To 'catch up' with where someone who had just bought a house is now, I will have to be ridiculously suc

      • I know exactly how you feel. I am in the top 0.1% for income and live a pretty good lifestyle, however if i compare myself to my peers 15 years older i will never achieve the heights they have due to capital appreciation of assets since 2000. I will basically own a big family home that would have been achieved by the top 5% in the past, most of my older colleagues have houses all over the world with sports cars and fancy holidays and most importantly, very little debt.

        Just got to keep chipping away at it

  • Wanna hear what I did for my friend's 50th birthday?

    No?

    Exactly!

    • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > Wanna hear what I did for my friend's 50th birthday?

      If the girls you hired were under 18, then I'm sure the police would like to hear.

  • Happy diabetes, Mr. Gates.
  • Warren Buffet quote : “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”. What a friendly guy is seems to be.

    The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is questionable. "Image washing" ?
    Few criticisms on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
    Investigations by Le Media (in French) [youtube.com]

    In short, as far as I can tell : they get money, and, instead of redistributing this money, they invest in fossil energy companies, Beyer Monsanto and alike, etc.
  • Sucking each other's dicks. Glad to see that Slashdot knows what "news for nerds" means.
  • I look for the good man. I would be your Mistress!! Punish me! =>> gg.gg/lvcm4
  • How is this news of any kind? Bill Gates might be the most singular evil person in the history of the human race.

    Corbett Report does a great expose, as does Really Graceful.

    Giving any information on these genocidal psychopaths is not helping anything.

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