Warren Buffett’s week-long charity lunch auction raised $3.46 million for the Glide Foundation of San Francisco this year. The online bidding nearly tripled the price during the last thirty seconds of the event, bringing the price up from $1.23 million, Ebay revealed.
Glide is an organization that provides meals for those in need, and runs a church in Tenderloin district as well. Proceeds from the auction are donated to the foundation each year, while the winning bidder and seven companions join Buffett for lunch at the Smith & Wollensky steakhouse in NY.
Since its inception 13 years ago, the lunch auction has raised over $14.6 million.
Buffett, a self-made billionaire and the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has pledged a great portion of his wealth to charity. He was introduced to Glide by his first wife Susan Buffett, who passed away eight years ago.
“I was suspicious when I heard my wife raving about this place in San Francisco,” Buffett shares. “What I witnessed was an institution and an individual that really gave up on nobody,” he said, referring to Rev. Cecil Williams, the founder of the organization.
“They took the people that the rest of the world had forgotten, people who’d given up on themselves, and they felt that every human being had a potential,” he added.”