Obama, Assange, Buffett: Who would you eat with?
President Obama and Julian Assange, founder of the document-dumping website WikiLeaks, announced two separate contests this week with the prize being a meal with the winners' favorite icon. Similarly, billionaire investor Warren Buffett closed an auction Friday for the opportunity to have lunch with him.
Mr. Obama's contest requires campaign supporters to donate a minimum of $5 to his re-election campaign, according to a post dated Wednesday on the campaign's website. Four winners will be selected at random. They will be flown to an undisclosed location to dine with the president at an unspecified date and put up for the night in a hotel.
(For the record, Mr. Obama's campaign valued dinner with the president at approximately $100.)
Lunch with Assange -- the highest bid at a converted amount of $3,031.97 as of this writing -- will raise money for WikiLeaks.
(In January, "60 Minutes" aired an interview where Julian Assange sat down with correspondent Steve Kroft.)
Video: Julian Assange, the "60 Minutes" interview
Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks
Assange: WikiLeaks played "inside the rules"
The auction page on the site eBay says the meal will be at "one of London's finest restaurants" on July 2. Assange is fighting extradition to Sweden, which wants to prosecute him for sex crimes charges brought by two women. Assange denies that he committed the charges.
The eight highest bidders win a seat at the table with Assange and Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian Marxist philosopher appearing with Assange at a public forum after the lunch. The auction closes just after midnight Eastern time June 21.
As for Buffett, the anonymous winner paid $2,626,411 -- $2,345,678 to win the eBay auction plus $280,733 to claim bid as the auction site's highest for a charity item -- to dine with the Oracle of Omaha and bring along seven guests to impress.
