Online charity auction sells lunch with Buffett for $2.63 Million

Warren BuffettA charity auction held online using eBay has sold a lunch at Manhattan’s Smith & Wollensky for the winning price of $2.63 million. 

This luncheon will allow the anonymous winner to have the opportunity to eat in the company of Warren Buffett, the renowned investor and the biggest name in the insurance business.  

The Oracle of Omaha charity online auction is an annual event, and this year’s results came in on Friday, June 10, 2011, after two bidders on eBay vied back and forth eight times since the auction started on Sunday, June 5. 

According to the organizers of the charity, though the last bid for the lunch was actually slightly less than $2.35 million, the winner of the auction later added the additional money so that the final total would beat the winning bid from last year by $111. 

This year’s interest in the charity auction appeared to be notably lower than it was last year.  There had been nine bidders in the 2010 event, and they had made 77 total bids to attempt to win the lunch. 

Benefitting from the auction, is GLIDE, a charity based in San Francisco which was favored by Susan Buffett, the investor’s late first wife. 

Warren Buffett, who is now 80 years old, is Berkshire Hathaway’s chief executive and is among the richest men in the world.  He is known to have certain eccentricities, such as his liking of red meat – hence the steak luncheon – and is often thought of in the context of the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, held in Omaha, where he routinely encourages investors to try a T-bone at his favorite local steakhouses.

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