Billionaire Warren Buffett’s charity lunch auction is back

If you want to meet billionaire Warren Buffett, this may be your final chance.

He’s auctioning off a lunch with himself, restoring an annual tradition that was put on hold because of the Covid-19 outbreak. Buffett’s last charity lunch, according to the event’s partner, San Francisco-based nonprofit Glide.

Glide, which runs a church and offers meals and healthcare to the impoverished and homeless, began holding annual “Power of One” charity auction dinners in 2000. It raised $25,000 from an anonymous contributor that first year. In 2019, bitcoin entrepreneur Justin Sun won the event with a $4.57 million offer.

Glide said on Monday that the lunches had raised over $34 million.

This year’s auction marks Glide’s “grand finale.” Despite the conclusion of the annual charity lunch series, a Glide representative told CNBC Make It that “Mr. Buffett’s beloved friendship with Glide will continue.”

Susie Buffett, Warren Buffett, first wife, died in 2004. The organization’s former pastor, Cecil Williams, “helps the folks that the world has given up on and he never gives up on anyone,” Buffett told CNBC in 2017.

“They genuinely help people who have struck rock bottom,” Buffett added. Williams has been doing it for decades, and if we can support him by generating money for him, I enjoy it.

Ms. Hanrahan said that “Warren Buffett,‘s friendship and generosity over the last 22 years” had “deepened Glide’s impact on the mechanisms that generate poverty and inequity.”

The charity meals are held at a New York steakhouse named Smith & Wollensky, where Warren Buffett‘s customary order is “a medium-rare steak with hash potatoes and a cherry coke,” according to the restaurant and previous auction winners.

On the merits of investing in crypto, Sun used his lunch to pitch Buffett on the worth of TRON, the 2019 winner. The plan didn’t work: weeks after the lunch, the billionaire told CNBC he still didn’t buy any cryptocurrencies and “never would.”

A lunch with Buffett might give you a chance to pitch him an idea or learn from his decades-long career that has earned him a net worth of $120 billion, according to Bloomberg.

If that sounds appealing, you can begin bidding on eBay on June 12 at 10:30 p.m. Eastern. The auction begins at $25,000 and ends on June 17 at 10:30 p.m.