Warren Buffett is picking up the pace of giving his fortune away. The 95-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway says his goal is to dispose of all his Berkshire shares within about eight years, accelerating the batches of stock he hands each year to charitable foundations. It is one of the clearest timelines yet on how the world's most famous investor plans to unwind one of the largest fortunes ever assembled.
Where the billions are going
This year's gift underlines the plan. Buffett is handing about one million Berkshire Class B shares to foundations run by his three children — the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation — and a further nine million shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late wife. Each year's donation is converted from the Class A shares Buffett holds into the Class B shares the foundations receive, a routine that has quietly redistributed his stake for nearly two decades. He has already given away well over half of his Berkshire fortune since he began his annual donations in 2006, and has long promised the overwhelming bulk of his wealth to philanthropy rather than his heirs. Setting a firm eight-year deadline turns that slow drip into a countdown, handing his children's foundations both the money and the timeline to deploy it.
The Gates snub
One long-standing recipient is conspicuously missing. For the first time in roughly two decades, Buffett skipped the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and left it off his list of future gifts. The omission is pointed: it follows a trove of US Justice Department documents released earlier this year that reignited scrutiny of Bill Gates's ties to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, and Buffett is reportedly holding off on further gifts until he sees how that plays out.
For a man who had backed the Gates Foundation for the best part of two decades, quietly dropping it now sends a message as loud as any statement. It is also a reminder to the many investors who track Buffett's every move that even the most celebrated philanthropic partnership can cool — and that the steady disposal of his stake will reshape who holds sway over Berkshire in the years ahead.
