A lunch date with legendary investor, Warren Buffett, was sold more than a quarter of a million dollars last night.

The winning bid in the online auction of a lunch for eight with the “Oracle of Omaha”, and head of Berkshire Hathaway, went for US$250,100. Bidding opened at US$10,000. The winning bidder is anonymous, going by the screen name “schtinyt”.

The lunch will be held in New York between May 5 and May 14, 2004, unless the winner wants to make an earlier date in Omaha.

Proceeds from the auction go to the Glide Foundation, a San Francisco-based non profit that fights poverty, hunger and homelessness.

The event was billed as a, “once-in-a-lifetime chance to pick the brain of the one and only Warren Buffet.”