One of the world’s largest inheritances has already been decided. The world’s most prestigious investor, Warren Buffett, the main shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, has revealed to The Wall Street Journal Buffett, 93, will leave the bulk of his fortune to a new charitable foundation run by his children. The investor is the world’s 10th richest man, with an estimated fortune of $129 billion (about 120 billion euros), according to the billionaires’ ranking. Bloomberg.
Warren Buffett has changed his bequest several times. For years he has been a major donor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and it was always thought that a large part of it would go to Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ charity, which focuses on healthcare, poverty alleviation and gender equality. Since 2006, Buffett has donated more than $39 billion to the foundation. The investor was a member of the foundation’s board of trustees, but left it in 2021, weeks after Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce. Melinda herself recently announced that she was disassociating herself from the foundation.
Buffet will continue to make donations to the Gates Foundation during his lifetime and, in fact, has announced the imminent delivery of Berkshire Hathaway shares valued at about $4 billion. The investor committed in 2006 to continue making these contributions to that organization and those directed by his children, for the equivalent of 5% of his shares each year. But the inheritance has another destination: “The Gates Foundation will not receive money after my death,” Buffett said in the interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The investor has three children: Susie, 71 years old; Howie, 69, and Peter, 66. The first two are on the board of Berkshire Hathaway and all three already have their own charitable foundations. Susie Buffet chairs the Sherwood Foundation, dedicated to children’s education and social justice, and the Susan Thompson Buffet Foundation, named after her mother and providing college scholarships in Nebraska for more than 50 years. Howie Buffett leads the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which targets marginalized populations around the world on issues such as food security, conflict mitigation, and combating human trafficking. Peter heads the NoVo Foundation, with programs aimed at indigenous communities.
These four foundations run by his children are already supported by donations from Warren Buffett, but the investor wants to leave his inheritance to a new foundation. In it, the decisions about the destination of the funds will be adopted unanimously by his three children, according to information from the New York media, which explains that he has made this decision after seeing how his children have matured over the years. .
“I feel very, very good about the values of my three sons, and I have 100% confidence in how they will carry things out,” Warren Buffett said in an exclusive interview with the aforementioned media outlet. “I like to think that I can think outside the box.” [como se dice en el argot empresarial de quienes tienen iniciativas originales]“But I’m not sure I can think outside the box when it’s six feet below the surface and do a better job than three people on the surface that I trust completely,” he added.
The Wall Street Journal He has also spoken with Buffett’s children, who still have no concrete plans about what they will do with the inheritance. “We haven’t talked about what we’re going to do because it seems a little premature,” Susie Buffett said. “I imagine it will probably be kind of a continuation of what we’ve been doing,” she added.
“You have to write your obituary and figure out how to live up to it,” Buffett said at Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders meeting last year. His obituary will say he is donating the fortune to a foundation run by his children.
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