The veteran chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has made the letter that he has written to his company’s investors every year for decades a long-awaited tradition. That letter, beyond showing an analysis of the market from the peculiar point of view of the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, also usually reveals the amount that the millionaire will allocate to donations.
1,140 million for solidarity projects. In this year’s letter, Warren Buffett, 94, places special emphasis on following his donation roadmap by allocating $1.14 billion to his family’s four foundations.
That amount will result from converting 1,600 class A shares of Berkshire Hathaway into 2.4 million class B shares, as explained by Bloomberg.
The four family foundations. The majority of the pledged donation will go to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, created in memory of his wife Susan who died in 2004, to which he will allocate 1.5 million of those shares.
The remaining 900,000 shares will be allocated equally to the foundations created by his three sons: Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. One of the conditions of these donations is that all of them agree unanimously in all the actions of the foundation.
Record donations. With this donation, Warren Buffett, who is estimated to be worth $148.8 billion according to Forbes, breaks a new record in terms of his annual allocation to philanthropy. In 2023, his donation totaled 870 million dollars, while in 2022 the figure was 750 million dollars destined for his family foundations, according to what he published. CNN.
In fact, it was Buffett’s wife Susan who started this tradition by allocating $10 million of her personal fortune to each of her children’s foundations, and bequeathing 96% of her assets to her own foundation upon her death. A total of 3,000 million dollars.
Pledge to donate. After the death of his wife, the millionaire took over and it is he who made the commitment to donate 99% of his fortune to charitable causes through his family foundations. “Now the children have more than justified our hopes and, after my death, they will have full responsibility for gradually distributing all my properties in Berkshire. These now represent 99.5% of my wealth,” Buffett states in his letter.
In an article by The New York Timesthe millionaire revealed the roadmap for managing his fortune after his death, indicating the steps in which his fortune will be liquidated for philanthropic purposes. “The enormous wealth that I have accumulated may take longer to be used than the time my children live,” said the millionaire, referring to his children’s ages of 71, 69 and 66.
“I have seen my children become good and productive citizens. In many cases, they have different opinions than mine and their siblings, but they share common values that are unbreakable,” the veteran investor highlighted in his letter.
Bill Gates, the great absentee. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a regular recipient of Buffett’s donations. However, something seems to have cooled in the relationship between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett after the divorce and departure of Melinda Gates from the direction of his foundation, as the writer Tim Schwab pointed out in his book ‘The Bill Gates problem’.
Warren Buffett has already donated more than $39 billion to his friend Bill’s foundation, but in this round he has not allocated any shares to his cause. Furthermore, as we already reported in WorldOfSoftware, the millionaire has established that, after his death, the Gates Foundation will permanently stop receiving donations from Warren Buffett’s fortune.
In WorldOfSoftware | Warren Buffett does not want to invest even in his own company: the Treasury is already preparing a bill of 20,000 million dollars
Imagen | Flickr (Fortune Live Media)
