OMAHA — The winning bid of $200,100 for a private lunch with software titan Marc Benioff may seem disappointing at first after years of multimillion-dollar bids for a private meal with investor Warren Buffett, but the winner also pledged to donate a total of $1.5 million to the Californian homeless charity benefiting from the auction.
The weeklong eBay auction raising money for the Glide Foundation in San Francisco concluded Friday evening. This is the first year that a meal with Benioff, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce, has been the prize after Buffett raised $53 million for Glide over more than two decades of lunches.
READ MORE: SF Glide Foundation auctions lunch with Marc Benioff
The winner of the Benioff auction chose to remain anonymous, as have many of the winners of a steak lunch with Buffett over the years. The 93-year-old Buffett decided to make the 2022 auction his last as he continued to cut back on his public appearances, but last weekend Buffett, who heads the Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, spent the day answering questions from thousands of its shareholders. at the company’s legendary annual meeting. The last Buffett auction raised $19 million.
AP file photos / Nati Harnik, Eric Risberg
The auction will still boost Glide, which provides meals, health care, job training, rehabilitation and housing for the poor and homeless, but it represents a small portion of the organization’s $31 million annual budget. Buffett became a fan of the charity after his first wife introduced him to it, and he always said he was impressed by how Glide managed to give new hope to people in desperate situations.
The Buffett Auctions started in 2000 and continued every year until the pandemic took a few years off. As of 2008, each winning bid for lunch with the investing giant was $1 million.
