Once 93-year-old Warren Buffett dies, his donations to the Gates Foundation will dry up.
“The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death,” Buffett recently told the Wall Street Journal.
The chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway told WSJ last week that nearly all of his massive wealth will go to a newly created trust overseen by his three children. Buffett currently owns approximately $130 billion of Berkshire stock. It’s unclear how the trust will allocate the funds. Each of his children also run their own independent foundations.
From 2006 to 2023, the Seattle-based Gates Foundation received $39.3 billion from Buffett. On Friday, Buffett announced his annual gift to the foundation, which this year totaled more than $4 billion worth of Berkshire shares.
Buffett historically had a close relationship with Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, creating the Giving Pledge with the couple in 2010 and serving as a trustee of the philanthropic foundation beginning in 2006.
Bill and Melinda announced their divorce in May 2021, and Buffett’s resignation as a trustee at the foundation followed soon after.
In May of this year, Melinda French Gates announced that she was resigning as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that she co-founded in 2000 and is on focused on global health, agriculture and families. The organization changed its name to the Gates Foundation following her departure.
While Buffett has donated generously to the foundation, whose trust totaled $75.2 billion at the start of this year, he had always been vague about how far his giving would extend.
In 2006, Buffett wrote to Bill and Melinda that he was “irrevocably committing to make annual gifts of Berkshire Hathaway ‘B’ shares throughout my lifetime” starting with a donation of $1.5 billion, and stating that he expected amount to increase substantially over the years.
The foundation reportedly had for many years anticipated receiving a giant posthumous donation from Buffett.
But in 2022, the WSJ reported that foundations run by Buffett’s children were making preparations for an influx of money and the Gates Foundation was scrambling to make other plans.
