Warren Buffett is giving the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities an additional $5.3 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock. This is Buffett’s largest yearly contribution since he started giving these gifts in 2006. With these contributions, Buffett’s total charitable giving—which includes contributions to the family charities over the previous two Novembers—now stands at almost $57 billion. About 13 million shares of Berkshire Class B were included in the most recent contribution, which was made public on Friday. Buffett is contributing 9.93 million shares to the Gates Foundation, bringing his total donation of Berkshire shares to almost $43 billion.
Furthermore, he is contributing 993,035 shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which bears the name of his late first wife, and 695,122 shares to the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation, three charitable organizations headed by his children, Peter, Susan, and Howard. With his children acting as executors of his will, Buffett, 93, intends to donate over 99% of the wealth he amassed at Omaha, Nebraska’s Berkshire, which he has led since 1965. Owning dozens of companies, like the BNSF railroad and Geico auto insurance, as well as stocks like Apple, Berkshire is a conglomerate worth around $880 billion. Even though Buffett has donated almost half of his Berkshire stock since 2006, he still holds roughly one-seventh of the outstanding shares.
Before his most recent gifts, Forbes magazine estimated his assets to be $134.3 billion, placing him as the tenth richest person in the world. Buffett stated in a statement that while he was valued at roughly $44 billion at the start of the gifts, his present wealth was generated by compound interest, “simple and generally sound capital deployment” at Berkshire, and the “American tailwind.” Along with Buffett and Bill Gates, the Giving Pledge was created, whereby 245 individuals, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Michael Bloomberg, pledged to donate at least half of their wealth to charitable causes.
Warren Buffett donates record $5.3 bil. Berkshire shares to charityhttps://t.co/O8SC5hXX9Mpic.twitter.com/2P5KHowlFl
— goi of the tin foil hat society (@goi1_p) June 29, 2024
