Warren Buffett and IKEA founder will be missed in Trump era

There’s probably only one eatery in Ireland where you could feed a whole family for under €20.

Afficionados of furniture store Ikea will know what I’m talking about: its café charges as little as 95c for an actual meal, albeit a kid’s portion of pasta.

This is the only dining experience where your heart isn’t in your mouth when you see the prices –  just some fairly tasty Swedish meatballs (my favourite).

These cost €6.50, by the way, including mash, peas, creamy sauce and lingonberry jam to give it an authentic Scandinavian flavour.

I recently ‘splashed out’ there on those meatballs, a tasty Scandinavian-style marinated salmon starter (€3.95) followed by raspberry dome dessert (pictured) all for the princely sum of  €14.20, the cost of a starter in many eateries.

And those are the pricey options. You could get a three-course adult’s meal for as little as €6.30 (salad, pasta and an 80c cinnamon bun for dessert).

The man we can thank for IKEA’s low-cost philosophy is Ingvar Kamprad, who died in 2018 at the age of 91.

The IKEA founder was a well-known ‘skinflint’ – and proud of it – in the mould of many business leaders of his era who grew up in the great global depression of the 1930s (triggered, scarily, by US tariffs – and more on those later).

“I'm a bit tight with money, but so what?,” he declared defiantly.

“I could regularly travel first class, but having money in abundance doesn't seem like a good reason to waste it.. If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example.”

Ingvar began his business career selling matches on his bicycle at the age of five and founded Ikea, appropriately, at his uncle’s Ernst’s kitchen table at 17. 

He never lost touch with his thrifty roots growing up on a Swedish farm and espoused corporate responsibility as a company goal. IKEA is still ranked as one of the world’s most ethical companies.

Another famous  tight-wad of the same era and mould is investment guru Warren Buffett, whose like we certainly won’t see again either.

Warren bought a run-down textile company called Berkshire Hathaway in 1970 when its shares were worth $7.50. Using homespun down-to-earth wisdom, like Ingvar, he made it an investment vehicle whose shares cost over $800k each.

He created nearly a trillion dollars in wealth for himself and his legion of shareholders by promoting long-term ‘value investing’. This means buying firms that actually make stuff and holding onto them, avoiding unregulated and non-productive crazes like cryptocurrency, which he likened to ‘rat poison’.

'Our favourite holding period is for ever', Buffett once declared. And true to his word, Berkshire Hathaway has held shares in Coca-Cola for more than 35 years and American Express for 30.

However, he also moves much of Berkshire Hathaway’s wealth out of the shares market when he foresees trouble coming down the line.

And incredibly, he did so in time to avoid the carnage caused by the dot.com bubble, the crash of 2008 and Donald Trump’s tariff’s slump this year.

Buffett is disgusted by the greed of business leaders today who pay themselves tens and even hundreds of millions at their shareholders’ expense. He lived on a salary of $100,000 (€89k) and never took a dividend from his company, intending to leave all of his €168bn in wealth to charity.

He told his shareholders: ‘Chief executives talk about “diversity” but they don’t care about any of that kinda stuff. They just care about their comp[ensation]. There’s never been such a transfer of wealth in our history. And it’s obscene.’

Buffett liked to stop by McDonalds for breakfast en route to work in modest offices in the backwater city of Omaha Nebraska, where he lived for decades in the same five-bedroomed motorway-adjacent home that he bought for $31,500.

Last week Buffett stepped down from Berkshire Hathaway, bringing an end to his extraordinary era.

He didn’t go quietly. Buffett, who usually avoids politics, warned that the US should not use ‘trade as a weapon’ and ‘it’s a big mistake in my view when you have 7.5 billion people who don’t like you very well.’

Buffett didn’t mention Donald Trump by name. He’s too smart to bring the US president’s increasingly-feared wrath down on his beloved shareholders.  But a fondness for McDonald’s food is absolutely the only thing he and Trump have in common.

The wisdom, modesty and sense of corporate social responsibility of departed business leaders like Kamprad and Buffett are a sad and stark contrast to the naked greed of the new lot – never mind the added grifting,

destructive chaos and boastful buffoonery of Donald Trump.