Warren Buffett celebrated Thanksgiving a little early this year by giving stock valued at $866.4 million to his family foundation and the foundations of his three children on Tuesday.
The billionaire financier announced in a news release that he gave 1.5 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway Class “B” stock to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife, and 300,000 shares apiece to the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and NoVo Foundation, his three children’s grant makers. Those transfers of stock mean the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation received $541.5 million, and his children’s foundations got $108.3 million each.
Buffett also announced plans he has laid out in his will. He has named his three children — Susan, Howard, and Peter — as executors of the will and the trustees of the charitable trust to which he plans to give the bulk of his fortune when he dies. His net worth stands at about $121 billion at the moment, according to Forbes. Buffett said in the news release that the trust will donate most of its money to charity in the decade or so after his death and that he designed his will as a straightforward, no-frills document that will be made available to the public.
“After my death, the disposition of my assets will be an open book — no ‘imaginative’ trusts or foreign entities to avoid public scrutiny but rather a simple will available for inspection at the Douglas County Courthouse,” Buffett said in the announcement.
The 93-year-old has ramped up his giving over the past year. Last November he gave stock valued at nearly $759 million to the four foundations. These gifts are in addition to annual payments he makes to the four foundations and to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fulfill the historic multibillion dollar pledges he made in 2006.
He became the biggest U.S. donor in history that year when he pledged 10 million shares of his Berkshire Hathaway Class “B” stock, then valued at about $36.1 billion, to the Gates Foundation, plus 1 million Berkshire shares, then valued at $3.6 billion, to the foundation named for his first wife, who died in 2004, and 350,000 shares, then valued at about $1.3 billion apiece, to foundations created by his three children.
Combined, those five pledges amounted to more than $43.5 billion at the time. In 2010, Buffett and Berkshire’s other shareholders approved a stock split, which significantly increased the number of shares Buffett has given the five foundations in the years since.
Buffett has been paying off those five pledges for the last 17 years, and including Tuesday’s donations he has given a total of nearly $51.6 billion to the five foundations, including more than $4.7 billion to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.
Buffett established the grant maker in 1964 to manage the family’s charitable giving. It is run by his former son-in-law, and two of his children serve on its board. The foundation supports women’s reproductive health; provides college scholarships for students in Nebraska, where the foundation is located; and backs the ACLU and other nonprofits.
He has given more than $2.5 billion apiece to the Sherwood, Howard G. Buffett, and NoVo foundations. The Sherwood Foundation is his daughter Susan Buffett’s grant maker. Through it, she supports social-justice work and early-childhood education. Peter Buffett’s fund, the NoVo Foundation, promotes alternative ways of living, such as local agriculture, food coops, and worker-owned businesses; and Howard Buffett’s foundation backs agriculture, clean-water, and anti-poverty programs.
