Warren's Ancestors Didn't Come From Margaritaville

The new genetic genealogy company everyone's talking about is 23andMe—mostly because one of its founders, Anne Wojcicki, is married to Google founder Sergey Brin. The company's first order of business was to set up a website and get Warren Buffett and Jimmy Buffett to spit in cups.

About two months ago Warren and Jimmy submitted DNA to 23andMe. (Warren "just kept spitting into a little receptacle, and then we FedExed it. Not very elegant," says his assistant. Jimmy did the same.)

When the results came back a month later, Wojcicki - a 33-year-old Yale grad and former health-care industry analyst - and her associate Joanna Mountain called Warren from 23andMe's offices, just half a mile from Google's Mountain View, Calif., campus, and broke the news that he need not include Jimmy in his will. In fact, "I'm as closely related to you as Jimmy is," said Mountain, the head of 23andMe's ancestry product line and a former professor of anthropological genetics at Stanford. [Link]

I wonder if company executives will personally deliver the news to everyone who sends in a DNA sample.

Billionaire Ready to Draw Blood

From the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune of May 25, 2005:

Buffetts: Friends or family?
The billionaire and the singer may have to take DNA test to find the answer
By Ethan Smith
The Wall Street Journal

'Uncle' Warren
'Cousin' Jimmy
Billionaire financier
Renowned island troubadour

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and musician Jimmy Buffett share a 20-year friendship. They talk on the phone regularly about business.

Warren Buffett's sister Doris Buffett, an amateur genealogist, is considering DNA testing to establish a conclusive genetic link.

[snip]

Besides sharing a surname, the two men have long suspected that they also share a common genetic history. "Warren leaves messages for 'Cousin Jimmy' and always has," says the singing Buffett, 58. "I'll take it from him." The singer calls the financier "Uncle Warren."

No one knows for sure. The two are only now coming to the end of a two-decade process of determining how or whether they are actually related.

The attempt to link the two strains of Buffettmania has been spearheaded by Doris Buffett, Warren's 77-year-old sister. "I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to connect up the two families," says Doris. Despite years of research, she has been unable to establish a conclusive link. She says she is considering DNA testing to make a certain determination.

[Read the whole story]

Her next task: Track down Cousin Jimmy's lost shaker of salt.