Another Example of Journalistic Half Truths!

This time from Marie-Claire.com.

Not just money — gobs of it. Nicole Buffett's grandfather is the legendary investor Warren Buffett, whose $58 billion fortune made him the richest man on the planet, a mantle he seized from Bill Gates last fall. So deep are Buffett's pockets that when the financial markets cratered in September, the so-called Oracle of Omaha single-handedly buoyed Wall Street (at least for a day) by plunking down $5 billion on troubled investment bank Goldman Sachs. ("Canonize Warren Buffett," cried one headline on CNBC's Website.) But there's a bitter irony to Buffett's beneficence. Wall Street's white knight is also an unforgiving hardhead when it comes to his own granddaughter, whom he cut off two years ago after a falling-out. "For him to discard me like that was devastating," Nicole says matter-of-factly. "It permanently divided our family."

When Nicole was 4, her singer-songwriter mother married Warren Buffett's youngest child, Peter, a composer for commercials and films. He later adopted Nicole and her identical twin sister, who were embraced as kin by the larger Buffett family — especially Susan, Warren's first wife, an avid music lover and cabaret performer. "A lot of people don't realize that my family is full of artists," says Nicole. (Susan Buffett, who died in 2004, was an early buyer of Nicole's art and named Nicole one of "my adored grandchildren" in her will.)

Okay - so now we come to the truth of the matter. Nicole Buffet lives in Berkeley, California on $40,000 per year approximate income from selling paintings. She was "cut off" by Warren Buffet, a notoriously private man, because she ran her mouth about him in public. Granted, this doesn't rise to the level of ax murder, but WARREN BUFFET earned the millions, not this self-entitled female. She knew the deal from an early age because the education of his grandchildren - the complete education of each and every one of them - was paid for by Warren Buffet and each of his grandchildren knew from an early age that from then on they were on their own.

So what is the point of this article in Marie-Claire.com? Is she just whining for the sheer bloody pleasure of it? I don't know but this article raises my hackles to an appreciable degree. Listen lady, plenty of people manage to live quite respectably on $40,000 per year. And if you cannot manage your money to do so, that's not Warren Buffet's fault - or anyone else's for that matter. Poor thing - she doesn't have cable. Why should I care?