New York: It will cost more than half a million dollars for a successful bidder to dine with Warren Buffett, with bidding for that privilege in an online charity auction on eBay Incorporated now reaching a record $500,100.
Buffett, the 75-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will dine with up to eight persons, as he has since 2000, to benefit the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco non-profit that helps the poor, hungry and homeless.
Mohnish Pabrai, an Irvine, California investor, placed the $500,100 high bid, topping a $500,000 bid from ‘fastisslow’. He also topped a $460,200 bid earlier on Monday.
"Hopefully we'll prevail, but it's clear there are now three bidders, and the bidding could well get fast and furious," said Pabrai, an unsuccessful bidder in past years, in an interview. Bidding began on June 22, and will end Thursday at 0200 GMT on Friday. The winner will dine with the world's second-richest person at a Manhattan steakhouse, Smith & Wollensky.
The bids increased after Buffett on Sunday announced plans to give about $37.1 billion of his $44 billion fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and to foundations on behalf of his late wife Susan and his three children.
His roughly $30.7 billion donation to the Gates Foundation, run by Microsoft Corporation Chairman Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, doubles that entity's size to about $60 billion. That's more than five times bigger than the second largest US charitable group, the Ford Foundation.
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