Charlie Munger, the influential investor and longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman, has died. He was 99. During his lifetime, Munger gave away at least $550 million to charity. His big public gifts primarily went to higher education, and he directed many of those donations toward student housing and other building projects.
His largest gift was a $200 million pledge to the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2016, mostly to build a new residence hall for undergraduates, although $65 million went toward housing for visiting physicists. His second largest donation, $100 million in 2013, went toward building another residence hall, this time at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The housing was for graduate students, and Munger kicked in an additional $10 million to support graduate fellowships. He gave the university’s law school $20 million in 2011 to renovate a housing complex for law students.
Munger was not an alumnus of either one. He attended the University of Michigan in the 1940s but did not graduate. He had a home in Santa Barbara, and a grandson, Charles Munger III, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at UC Santa Barbara.
He appeared on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors five times since 2004. In 2013, he told the Chronicle that he supported student housing because he believed it had a significant effect on students’ education.
“It’s very uncommon that administrations are much interested in creating dormitories because if you’re an elite place and you’ve got 10 applicants for every spot, it’s perfectly natural to think, ‘Why the hell do we need to do any more for the students? They’re begging to get in,’” Munger said. “I don’t think you abuse your best customers merely because you can get by with it.”
An architecture buff, Munger helped create the original plan for Munger Hall at UC Santa Barbara. The design sparked controversy in 2021 and was roundly criticized because it had so few windows. Most of the rooms would have had only artificial light.
Although Munger defended the design, an homage to the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, critics dubbed the design “Dormzilla.” In August, the university scrapped those plans and began the search for another design.
The financier, whose wealth stood at an estimated $2.6 billion when he died, also made gifts to support construction projects at other organizations. He gave the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, Calif., $32 million in 2013 for a new visitor center, and $21 million to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles in 2018 for an expansion of the emergency department and to make the building better able to survive damage from earthquakes.
Munger was born in Omaha to a comfortable upper middle-class family. He was a math student at the University of Michigan but left when World War II broke out. He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. The military sent him to the University of New Mexico and the California Institute of Technology to study meteorology and thermodynamics, and he ended up working as a weather forecaster in Alaska.
He later graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to co-found the law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson. He joined Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway in the mid 1970s. Buffett has credited Munger with teaching him the finer points of investing in valuable companies.
