Private lunch with Warren Buffett goes to anonymous bidder for $3.4 million, tying record
The top bidder and as many as seven guests get a chance to dine with the billionaire at New York’s Smith & Wollensky steakhouse
Billionaire Warren Buffett has again auctioned off a private lunch to raise money for a San Francisco homeless charity, and this time the meal goes to the highest bidder for $3.4 million.
The bid of $3,456,789 from Friday night’s winner, who wishes to remain anonymous, ties for the record highest. In 2012, the winner also paid $3,456,789 to become the most expensive individual charity item ever sold on eBay.
The weeklong eBay auction began Sunday and wrapped up Friday night. By midmorning Friday, the bidding reached more than $2.6 million, nearly $300,000 higher than last year’s winning bid by Zhu Ye, chairman of China’s Dalian Zeus Entertainment Co.
Six of the past eight winners paid more than $2 million to dine with Buffett, the investor who leads the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate.
Buffett has raised more than $20 million for the Glide Foundation. The lunch auctions began after Buffett’s first wife, Susie, showed him Glide, where she had been volunteering. Susie Buffett died in 2004, but the connection between Warren Buffett and Glide’s founders has endured.
