Pick out a quiet town and tie it down

September 6, 2023 1:00 PM

American Oligarchy How Warren Buffett’s billionaire son took over a U.S. city and made it his personal playground.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs (36 comments total)

"[Mr. Potter's Howard Buffet's] existence literally perpetuates inequity."
posted by riverlife at 1:14 PM on September 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

100 years ago, Lillie Coit used her inherited fortune to cosplay as a firefighter.
Now, Warren's son is cosplaying as a cop. It IS obnoxious, but I'll accept it as vaguely preferable to greater malice of other Nepogarchs like Elon Musk or Erik Prince. At least Howard's fantasizing is only impacting one city, rather than changing the discourse of the world.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 1:22 PM on September 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

I guess when it comes to a Buffett-designed lifestyle, I'll take Margaritaville over Decatur
posted by chavenet at 1:25 PM on September 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

One dying city, the article is at pains to note.
posted by Artw at 1:32 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Related-ish: What Happens When Dave Chappelle Buys Up Your Town
posted by Artw at 1:35 PM on September 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

As rich people who buy up towns go, I think I prefer Nora Roberts.
posted by box at 1:50 PM on September 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'll accept it as vaguely preferable to greater malice of other Nepogarchs like Elon Musk or Erik Prince

So on a scale from 'partial dystopia' to 'complete hellscape,' this is actually pretty mild. That is definitely a 2020s frame of reference.
posted by LooseFilter at 1:51 PM on September 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

I hope the billionaire who rules the corporate fief I end up living in is a kind one. I assume the online activity of all subjects will be reviewed to screen for troublemakers, so let me just affirm here my undying devotion to their great and wise regime.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:01 PM on September 6, 2023 [34 favorites]

John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe WW1 as "the great ungluing" that marked the end of monarchy in Europe.

In political discussions we’re all talking in terms of the rise of fascism, but in a lot of ways it looks more like the return of monarchy, and a full cast of barons, dukes, and earls already seems to be in place.
posted by jamjam at 2:13 PM on September 6, 2023 [16 favorites]

All Billionaires Are Cops.
posted by splitpeasoup at 2:23 PM on September 6, 2023 [29 favorites]

"You should leave your children enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing." - Warren Buffett

Sometimes doing nothing is better.
posted by justkevin at 2:37 PM on September 6, 2023 [18 favorites]

Inhered wealth translated into political power = feudalism.
posted by JohnFromGR at 2:58 PM on September 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

a full cast of barons, dukes, and earls already seems to be in place

equity lords

There's an adjacent story with the Uihleins (of ULINE company infamy) who buy Republican politicians and promote right-wing extremist conspiracy theories, but they also use their money to make Manitowish Waters, Wisc. their personal playground, of sorts.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:03 PM on September 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

Warren Buffett has been issuing public pronouncements for a long, long time--I bet there are some real gems in there that could be applied to his large adult son.

Without even trying hard, there's:

"Look for three things in a person: intelligence, energy, and integrity. If they don't have the last one, don't even bother with the first two."

Or:

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Warren Buffett drops jewels like these all day, and he's done it since the freaking '50s. Just one more:

"Never do anything in life if you would be ashamed of seeing it printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper for your friends and family to see.."

I can only imagine the elder Buffett is very, very disappointed.
posted by box at 3:08 PM on September 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

> justkevin: ""You should leave your children enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing." - Warren Buffett"

Yeah, this is a very famous quote that I always point out doesn't actually specify anything concrete (e.g.: an actual number) so the listener is free to read into it whatever number they think is "enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing".

> box: "I can only imagine the elder Buffett is very, very disappointed."

Meanwhile, I got a little curious about Howard's charity, so I looked it up their IRS filings on ProPublica. The first thing which caught my eye was that in 2022, this charity received >$300M in donations, which struck me as a ludicrously large amount for nearly any charity never mind this particular one... until I scrolled down and found that nearly all of this came from one Warren Buffet of Omaha, NE via just over one million shares of BRK.B (Berkshire Hathaway stock, class B). Similar but slightly smaller amounts can be found in previous years' filings (2021: $221M, 2020: $154M, 2019: $192M, 2018: $181M). At the same time, it seems that this charity disburses pretty much the entirety of their donations every year, so at least they're not using these donations to simply increase their capital position which, as of the end of 2022, stands at >$780M (!). On the one hand, for a hundred-billionaire like Warren, a few hundred million per year isn't that much; on the other hand, it's still a few hundred million per year.
posted by mhum at 3:40 PM on September 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

I can only imagine the elder Buffett is very, very disappointed.

Apparently not disappointed enough to, you know, do something about it.
posted by star gentle uterus at 3:49 PM on September 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

Ugh. Christ what an asshole.

Give me a billion dollars and I can give it to actually worthy causes without wanting to cosplay a cop, and stroke my own importance.

Disappoint the Warren is enabling this to that extent...

Tax lawyers do have a lot to say but,...
He is certainly giving enough to his son to enable him to do nothing but fuck some shit up. And now he has moved on to taking over another nearby town?

I guess, as long as dad is giving you three hundred million a year, you can keep on doing "good" stuff with those funds, but wow...
posted by Windopaene at 3:51 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

And if any mefites want to send me 300 Million dollars to help out the Gay Space Communism/Crone Island scenario just memail me...
posted by Windopaene at 3:54 PM on September 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

To be fair, there's a lot of good being done with those billions and there seems to be at least some degree of wanting to contribute to a 'good' community. The problem, as I see it, is that it's all at the whim of someone who has a warped perception of what 'good' is. If Howard had grown up as someone who had to struggle at all in life, he might have a more balanced perspective of what a town needs to truly prosper. If his largesse were informed by that more balanced view, his playing at being a cop would be more tolerable as just a harmless boyhood fantasy coming to life.
posted by dg at 4:26 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

"You should leave your children enough so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing." - Warren Buffett

anyone who ever quoted Warren Buffet to me was eventually dead to me. Truly one of the worst people who ever lived. Do your research.
posted by any major dude at 4:35 PM on September 6, 2023 [12 favorites]

I guess when it comes to a Buffett-designed lifestyle, I'll take Margaritaville over Decatur

Weirdly enough, the Margaritaville location in New Orleans used to be on Decatur Street.
posted by brundlefly at 5:12 PM on September 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

Harvard-educated writer disapproves. No sources cited?
posted by Ideefixe at 5:25 PM on September 6, 2023

To be fair, there's a lot of good being done with those billions and there seems to be at least some degree of wanting to contribute to a 'good' community.

A lot of "good" being done selectively with money stolen from the productive classes and dangled before them to make them grovel. You think Americans couldn't build their own hospitals if they weren't being starved to feed the egos of princes? Horseshit.
posted by klanawa at 5:32 PM on September 6, 2023 [22 favorites]

Inhered wealth translated into political power = feudalism.

There was a post a little while back about an essay Cory Doctorow wrote that claimed this. I thought it was really interesting but based on the comments here I think only about ten percent of the people discussing the article actually read it.
posted by Literaryhero at 6:19 PM on September 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Warren Buffett has been saying folksy, common sense things for generations, but how he actually behaves is a totally different story. The list of things “you wouldn’t want to see in your hometown newspaper” can vary significantly depending on whether or not you own the newspaper
posted by Jon_Evil at 8:00 PM on September 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

A lot of "good" being done selectively with money stolen from the productive classes and dangled before them to make them grovel. You think Americans couldn't build their own hospitals if they weren't being starved to feed the egos of princes? Horseshit.

Literally the point of all of this is to replace democratic control over the institutions of society with the control of individual rich assholes, and they're doing it with money, as klanawa notes, stolen from us in the first place.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:41 PM on September 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Absolutely. My poorly made point was that, in this case, at least there is some good for the public coming out of it. In effect, some of that stolen money is being given back to the community. I'm not saying that's great, but it's better than what most billionaires do with their money.
posted by dg at 10:55 PM on September 6, 2023

I mean using stolen money to exert power over society is literally the point of accumulating that much wealth.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:18 PM on September 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I can't argue with that.
posted by dg at 1:25 AM on September 7, 2023

The impact of rich guys playing cop isn’t entirely local. Their status generally gets them the right to carry firearms all over the country as well as to buy and carry weapons other people either can’t get or have to do a lot more paperwork to acquire.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 4:53 AM on September 7, 2023

> Inhered wealth translated into political power = feudalism.

Then there is no society that both makes its own food and is not feudal.

This is just faux cynicism.

Inherited wealth is, in fact, the most basic source of power in any society that's discovered the concept of property ownership. That's what the power is, basically.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 6:49 AM on September 7, 2023

Meanwhile, on a different scale, a bunch of Silicon Valley types have spent $800,000,000 to buy up an enormous bit of land in California to create their idea of the perfect city. I used to jokingly refer to certain types as RBs, short for rich bastards. I need to come up with a harsher sentiment.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:55 AM on September 7, 2023

I'm not sure I entirely trust the narrative of the “Weed, Pussy, Pancakes" guy, but I definitely get a Connor Roy vibe from this piece.
posted by ntk at 12:00 PM on September 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Imagine all you could do to improve a small town, and you decide to enrich the cops.
posted by hypnogogue at 5:26 PM on September 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Wow, this is wild:

"Jokes at Buffett’s expense are common in Decatur. Multiple people told me about one particularly infamous incident from his tenure in the sheriff’s office: Halloween night, 2017, when Sheriff Buffett took off on a wild car chase that led to a flipped Chevy Trailblazer and four people hospitalized."

It's like cosplaying... with consequences.
posted by mijustin at 3:18 PM on September 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I used to jokingly refer to certain types as RBs, short for rich bastards.

I've been following this because a) it's so San Francisco Tech Bullshit, and b) fuck those guys.

This article has some good coverage of and response to the project, and this gem:

“They’re being pushed off land they farmed for generations because of these rich, arrogant…LOMBARDS.”

He explained that he was using an acronym that happens also to be the name of a street in San Francisco: “Lots of Money But a Real Dickhead.”

posted by cardioid at 5:20 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]