The richest man in the world is ramping up his involvement in the campaign to elect Barack Obama the next president.

The Oracle of Omaha, speaking to reporters yesterday after Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting, predicted that the credit crunch may have passed its low point.

For this year at least, Bill Gates can no longer claim to be the richest man in the world.

On Feb. 11, when Forbes ranked assets of the richest people around the world, Microsoft stock had dipped because of its efforts to acquire Yahoo. Gates’s rank on the Forbes billionaire list dipped from 1 to 3. His good buddy, Warren Buffett, who now holds the top spot.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative may soon receive a big boost from the deep-pocketed Peter Peterson.

The head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Patty Stonesifer, told The New York Times that she would step down as head of the world’s largest philanthropic organization by the end of the year.

“It’s the right time,” Stonesifer, 51, told the Times. “We have a lot of momentum now, our strategies are in place, and it’s time to take the organization to the next level where we deliver on those strategies.”

Warren Buffett has followed the dealings of the Pritzker family for half a century, but he had never had a direct business connection to them. . .until now.

In a classic fiddling-while-Rome-burns story, the Wall Street Journal traced the activities of James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Stearns Cos. this summer.

While units of Bear Stearns, an investment and banking powerhouse, were collapsing because of the credit crisis in the subprime mortgage market, Cayne was out of reach for hours at a time, the Journal reported Thursday.

Not surprisingly – he’s a CEO after all – Cayne was incommunicado at times on the golf course.

But at other times he was, hold on to your hats, playing bridge.

After failing to get into Harvard Business School in 1950, a desperate Warren Buffett applied to Columbia, writing directly to then-professor David L. Dodd.

Buffett was accepted, and Dodd was so impressed by him that he invested in Buffett’s company. Nearly 60 years later, Dodd’s daughter, Barbara Dodd Anderson, has decided to give a large portion of the profits to George School, a Quaker high school in Bucks County, Pa.

While controversial tech entrepreneur Vinod Gupta
widely cultivates political alliances around the country, he stays
close to home when he picks board members for his Omaha-based company,
infoUSA.

Six of the company’s eight directors, including Gupta, have strong ties to Omaha or Nebraska, a Muckety analysis shows. A seventh is a name partner in a law firm that did more then $1 million in business with infoUSA last year.

Truly independent directors are a key to responsible corporate governance, experts say. If directors are too close to a CEO, they can’t properly oversee his actions.

Gupta’s lavish spending on his political connections, including naming buildings after Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in one of his India projects, have caused a backlash. Some infoUSA shareholders sued Gupta for wasting company money.

In business, Warren Buffett likes to invest in industries he understands. That means insurance companies, a candymaker, furniture and jewelry stores, even a daily newspaper. Nothing high tech.

In politics, the Oracle of Omaha is much the same. He is one of the world’s wealthiest people, but remains an outspoken critic of economic inequality. He lives in the same Omaha house today that he bought for $31,500 in 1958 and mainly supports Democrats.

Buffett helped Hillary Clinton raise $1 million at a New York fundraiser in June and says he will do the same later for Barack Obama.

“If you’re the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent,” Buffett says. Of course, just as in business, he would be hard pressed to ignore a dream deal. For him, that would be a presidential ticket of New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who recently became an independent, and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican with populist views.