NEW YORK, Dec 23 — When your grandfather is the world's richest man, you'd hardly expect to have to worry about paying the bills.
Yet Nicole Buffett, the dreadlocked granddaughter of the famously frugal Nebraska billionaire Warren Buffett, has no cable television or health insurance.
The 32-year-old abstract painter was adopted by Buffett's youngest son, Peter, who married Nicole's mum when she was just four years of age.
In a Marie Claire interview, Nicole said she has been financially cut off by her grandfather and lives on the money she makes selling her paintings.
Her famous surname helped her earn some of the US$40,000 (RM144,000) from sales of her paintings sold from a hippie enclave of Berkeley, outside San Francisco.
She said: “For most people, your life is largely determined by the wealth you were or weren't born into. But our family was supposed to be a meritocracy.”
The 78-year-old Buffett, who still lives in the Omaha suburban home he bought for US$31,500 in 1958 and self-drives an American-made car, believes in holding on to the values he grew up with.
He does not believe in rewarding those he calls “members of the lucky sperm club”.
Dubbed the “Oracle of Omaha”, Buffett had reportedly said: “I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing.”
Earlier this year, he toppled Microsoft's Bill Gates as the world's richest man with an estimated US$62 billion net worth, according to Forbes magazine.
Yet as the world's savviest investor who served as an adviser to Barack Obama during the presidential campaign and was touted as a possible Treasury secretary, Buffett paid himself only US$100,000 in salary in 2006.
Nicole's troubles with her grandfather began when she broke the family code to speak about life as a Buffett.
She appeared in a documentary made by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, about wealth, entitled “The One Percent”.
When asked how her grandfather would react to seeing her, she had said: “I definitely fear judgment. Money is the spoke in my grandfather's wheel of life.”
To worsen matters, while on a talk show to plug the documentary, Nicole said: “It would be nice to be involved with creating things for others with that money and to be involved in it. I feel completely excluded from it.”
On hindsight, she admitted her remarks sounded brusque, but Buffett had already taken offence.
A month later, he sent her a letter in which he said, among other things: “People will react to you based on that 'fact' (of having a famous surname) rather than who you are or what you have accomplished.
“I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin.”
Said a distressed Nicole: “He signed the letter 'Warren'. I have a card from him just a year earlier that's signed 'Grandpa'.”
Since their falling out, she said her grandfather does send sizeable Christmas cheques despite his no-freebies rule.
Though she dreams of a reconciliation, it is not likely. Still, she will never stop being a Buffett.
She added: “I will always be self-reliant. Grandpa taught me that, and it has set the tone for my life.” — The New Paper
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