Peter Buffett shows that even the son of a billionaire can pull up those bootstraps

People always asked Peter Buffett about his famous last name.

“Everybody thought I was related to Jimmy Buffett,” said the composer. “That was the constant question.”

Sadly for Parrotheads, he had no ties to the “Margaritaville” songwriter. Once in a blue moon, someone would wonder if he knew that investor in Omaha. Yes, he would answer, I’m Warren Buffett’s son.

For most of his 56 years, Peter lived a pretty average, anonymous life: marriage, kids, a low-profile music career. That all changed in 2006 when his dad announced to the world that he planned to give away the bulk of his fortune — now estimated at $67 billion — including a billion to each of his three kids' charities.

"When you have a billion-
dollar foundation, you're better-looking, your jokes are funnier, you're invited everywhere," Buffett joked to a crowd at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. "It's magical."

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Buffett was the opening act Wednesday night at the Family Firm Institute's global conference, a gathering of wealthy professionals who run family businesses. He was invited to present "Life Is What You Make It: A Concert & Conversation," based on his 2010 book "Life Is What you Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment."

Let's just get this out of the way: This is a terrible title. Self-help bromides from a billionaire's son? Please. And, to his credit, Buffett has the good grace to admit it. He opened his show by beating the audience to the punch line: "Easy for you to say." The book is targeted to that "small percentage of the globe" in a position to use their time and money to make meaningful change.

Title aside, Buffett has put together a quirky, thoughtful tale of going from a schoolboy in Nebraska to a world-famous name — all in service of sharing his message of social justice and equality. “I am kind of New-Agey,” he said after the show. “I try to keep it grounded so people don’t think I’m too kooky.” He’s toured all around the world, with stops on college campuses (some of his favorite shows) and, on this night, a hotel ballroom with an earnest, respectful audience.

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Wearing jeans, casual shirt and jacket, Buffett sat at a piano onstage, accompanied by a cellist, slides and videos, taking questions along the way from the audience. He began with what sounded like a stereotypical middle-class upbringing: a dad who went to the office, a lively mom, two older siblings and grandparents down the block. He went to public schools and didn’t have any sense of privilege or his family’s wealth — back then, no one really recognized the Buffett name outside of financial circles.

“That was the biggest gift in our family,” he said. “Nobody knew what they know now about my dad.”

His parents urged him to figure out his passion, and he dabbled with music but didn’t think he was talented enough to take it seriously. At age 19, after three semesters at Stanford, two things happened: He decided to give music another chance, and he inherited a share of his grandfather’s farm, which his father converted to $90,000 in Berkshire Hathaway stock. Today, that stock would be worth $120 million; instead, he dropped out of college and sold the stock to launch a music career — with his father’s blessing.

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“The reason why my dad and I get along so well is because we never ask the other one to be something they’re not,” he told the crowd. “He allowed me to be me and not something I wasn’t.”

The screens behind the stage lit up with commercials for MTV and milk for which he wrote the music; he made a couple of New Age albums and even scored the fire-dance scene in “Dances With Wolves.” According to Buffett, star Kevin Costner wanted him to do music for the entire movie; investors overruled Costner, unwilling to chance the soundtrack on an unknown.

“I’m glad it worked out the way it did, because at that time in my career, I couldn’t have pulled that off,” said Buffett. He won an Emmy for a later soundtrack and lived off his music, but he fell behind on his mortgage and faced other real-life problems.

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No one in the ballroom believed that for one nanosecond that Buffett, then married with two daughters, was ever really in dire straits. But a guy from the audience stood and asked, in the nicest possible way, how his relationship with his father would have been different if his dad had bailed him out.

"I'm not sure," he answered. "I certainly wouldn't have the self confidence or the self-worth if my parents were always there saying, 'Let me help, let me help.' ... My dad cared — both my parents did — but they weren't there to just swoop in and save the day. That was huge."

Moving into philanthropy

Of course, everything changed about a decade ago. In 2004, Buffett's mother died and left him $10 million — a surprise, because he always assumed all her money was going to charity. Two years later, his father announced he was giving away his billions to charities that included his three children's then-modest foundations. Before that, father and son could walk down the street unnoticed, but no longer: "Now, it's different and it's weird. Everybody knows him or wants his picture."

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And everyone knows the Buffett name and the money attached to it. Peter and his wife, Jennifer, run the now $3 billion NoVo Foundation, dedicated to helping women and girls around the globe. Last year, he wrote a controversial op-ed for the New York Times called "The Charitable-
Industrial Complex" criticizing self-satisfied "philanthropic colonialism" and urged philanthropists to rethink their assumptions: "Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market," he wrote. "Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It's when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex."

The couple don’t take salaries from the foundation; instead they live on the $10 million from his mother (“we’re very careful with it”) on a 50-acre farm in Upstate New York. They tried Manhattan for a few years, “but it was expensive, and we felt it was not us.”

No fancy jewels or art; the only splurge is Buffett’s recording studio, where he writes music to further the message of his foundation, then takes the show on the road. He ended the night with a song, after telling a story about meeting a 15-year-old girl from Kolkata, India, who had escaped from sex-trafficking.

“I asked her, ‘What can I do?’ She said, ‘Tell our story.’ So that’s what I do.”

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