Billionaire Berkshire Board Member David Gottesman Dies at 96

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David “Sandy” Gottesman, a

Berkshire Hathaway

board member, billionaire and longtime friend of Warren Buffett, died Wednesday at 96.

In 1964, Gottesman founded the New York investment firm First Manhattan, which announced his death on its website.

Gottesman befriended Buffett around the time that Buffett took control of Berkshire (ticker: BRK.A) in 1965 and was an early investor in the company when its stock sold for a tiny fraction of its current price.

Gottesman, who kept a low profile, likely was among the largest individual investors in Berkshire with a personal stake worth $2.6 billion, based on the company’s latest proxy statement. That is the largest interest among Berkshire board members besides Buffett—and more than the $1.7 billion holding of Berkshire Vice Chairman Charlie Munger.

With Gottesman’s death, Buffett has lost one of a dwindling group of longtime friends and contemporaries. Walter Scott, a Berkshire board member, died last year at 90. Thomas Murphy, the former chief of Cap Cities/ABC and another Berkshire board member, died in May at 96.

Buffett and Gottesman met in the mid-1960s and fast became friends, sharing investment ideas. “Buffett considered him a shrewd, disciplined, hard-nosed, opinionated, unabashed capitalist. Naturally, they hit it off,” wrote Alice Schroeder in The Snowball, her 2008 biography of Buffett.

“From then on,” Gottesman told Schroeder in the book, “every time I had a good idea, I would call Warren. It was like vetting. If you could get Warren interested in something, you knew that you had the right idea.” One of Gottesman’s ideas in which Buffett invested in was a Baltimore department store, Hochschild-Kohn.

First Manhattan runs about $24 billion, based on its U.S. equity holdings tallied by Bloomberg. It favors quality growth stocks like

Apple

(AAPL),

Microsoft

(MSFT),

Alphabet

(GOOGL), and

UnitedHealth Group

(UNH), but its largest investment by far is Berkshire, which accounts for about a third of its equity investments. The firm runs separate accounts for clients but doesn’t manage a mutual fund, unlike Ruane Cunniff & Goldfarb, which also has long ties to Buffett and operates the

Sequoia Fund
(SEQUX). Gottesman’s son, Robert, is executive chairman of First Manhattan.

Gottesman avoided the limelight and rarely talked to the media, telling the

New York Times

in an interview for his obituary in 2013 that “the only time a whale gets harpooned is when he surfaces.”

Gottesman was a trustee and benefactor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a trustee of Mount Sinai Medical Center. He joined the Berkshire board in 2004. Berkshire watchers will be interested to see who, if anyone, is named to replace Gottesman on the Berkshire board.

Write to Andrew Bary at [email protected]