Warren Buffett has donated $1.14 billion to his foundations. He missed a key point: the Bill Gates Foundation.

The veteran chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has made the letter he wrote to his company’s investors every year for decades a long-awaited tradition. This letter, in addition to analyzing the market from the special point of view of the Oracle of Omaha, also usually indicates the amount that the millionaire will allocate for donations.

1.140 million for solidarity projects. In this year’s letter, 94-year-old Warren Buffett focuses on fulfilling his giving roadmap, committing $1.14 billion to his family’s four foundations.

This amount will be obtained by converting 1,600 Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares into 2.4 million Class B shares, Bloomberg explained.

Four family foundations. Most 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 give 1.5 million of those shares.

The remaining 900,000 shares will be distributed equally among foundations created by his three sons: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. One of the conditions of these donations is that they all unanimously agree with all the actions of the fund.

Recording Donations. With the donation, Warren Buffett, who is worth $148.8 billion according to Forbes, breaks a new record for annual charitable contributions. According to his published data, in 2023 his donation was $870 million, and in 2022 that figure was $750 million earmarked for family foundations. CNN.

In fact, it was Buffett’s wife Susan who started this tradition by allocating $10 million from her personal fortune to each of her children’s foundations and bequeathing 96% of her assets to her own foundation upon her death. Only 3 billion dollars.

Promise to donate. After the death of his wife, the millionaire took over control and it was he who committed to donate 99% of his fortune to charity through his family foundations. “The children have now more than fulfilled our hopes, and after my death they will be solely responsible for the gradual distribution of all my property in Berkshire. She now represents 99.5% of my wealth,” Buffett states in his letter.

In the article New York TimesA millionaire has revealed his roadmap for managing his wealth after his death, outlining the steps by which his estate will be liquidated for charitable purposes. “The enormous wealth I have accumulated may take longer than my children’s lifetimes,” the millionaire said, referring to his children’s ages of 71, 69 and 66.

“I have seen my children become good and productive citizens. In many cases, their opinions differ from mine and their brothers and sisters, but they share common values ​​that are inviolable,” the veteran investor emphasized in his letter.

Bill Gates, the great absentee. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a regular recipient of Buffett’s donations. However, something seemed to have cooled in the relationship between Bill Gates and Warren Buffett following their divorce and Melinda Gates’ departure from running his foundation, as author Tim Schwab noted in his bookBill Gates problem‘.

Warren Buffett has already donated more than $39 billion to his friend Bill’s foundation, but he didn’t allocate a single share to his cause this round. Moreover, as we previously reported in Hatak, the millionaire has determined that after his death, the Gates Foundation will permanently stop receiving donations from Warren Buffett’s estate.

In Hatak | Warren Buffett doesn’t even want to invest in his own company: the Ministry of Finance is already preparing a bill for $20 billion

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