Some dads throw footballs. Some grill burgers. Warren Buffett? He read the paper—a lot. But according to his daughter, Susie Buffett, that didn't make him any less of a father.
"I always had a very strong sense of how much it mattered to him to be… in the house and there," she said in a 2015 interview for the HBO documentary "Becoming Warren Buffett." "He was at the dinner table every night. Very present at the dinner table."
It wasn't the typical hands-on, TV-dad kind of parenting. "He wasn't the dad out in the backyard throwing the football," she added. "And he wasn't really the dad, you know, sitting in the bedroom at night reading the stories with us." But that didn't mean he wasn't around. Quite the opposite.
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Buffett, known for being one of the busiest minds in finance, still made time to rock Susie to sleep and sing "Over the Rainbow"—a memory she holds especially close. "I have this insanely sentimental attachment to that song," she said, recalling how he even made a karaoke recording of it as a gift.
While he may have been immersed in reading or mentally juggling investments, he wasn't off on business trips or inaccessible. "A lot of my friends had dads that traveled a lot. My dad was in the house and there," she said. "I never felt like… he wouldn't have time for us. That didn't happen."
Susie recalled moments that were both simple and deeply thoughtful. "I remember one day coming home from school and there was a big box on the dining room table and there was a new dress in it and there was a Slo Poke sucker. I was about 8 years old and my dad took me to the ballet."
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Did he want to go? "Now that I'm older, I'm sure my mother forced him to do it," she said, laughing. "But I never knew that at the time."
And yes, even homework help was on the table—kind of. "It was sort of hopeless to get math help from him because he could get the answer and then he couldn't explain how he got it," she said.
The image Susie paints is less about traditional fatherhood and more about presence, consistency, and quiet reliability. "He was always there whenever we needed him, 'cause he was physically present."
So while Warren Buffett may not have been a bedtime-story dad or a backyard athlete, his daughter never questioned where he stood in her life. He was there. In the house. At the table. Rocking her to sleep. And, when it really mattered, just a room away.
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