A lot, apparently.
After a week of bidding, lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett at Manhattan’s Smith & Wollensky has been sold for $2.63 million.
(Self-made illiterate millionaire supporting British literacy campaign)
Interest in the lunch isn’t what it once was, according to Reuters. Last year, nine different bidders fought for the lunch on eBay, making a total of 77 bids. This year, only two people saw fit to enter a bidding war, and only eight bids were made between them.
The final bid, from an anonymous entrant, was just under $2.35 million. But the winner added another $300,000 or so, just to beat last year’s record number by about a hundred bucks.
The auction has come a long way from its first year in 2000, when the winner paid $25,000 for the sit-down with one of the world’s richest men.
The money raised by the auction goes to GLIDE, a San Francisco-based charity where Buffett’s first wife Susan volunteered often, until her death in 2004. The organization serves nearly one million meals to the homeless every year.
“You really want to make your charitable dollar go as far as it can,” Buffett said last year. And an organization like GLIDE, which has been in existence for 40 years and does its job “magnificently…they are the ones, in my view, to support.”
The winner may have overpaid slightly for the steak lunch, which goes for less than $50.