Buffett accelerates $6B giving plan, drops Gates Foundation from list

Warren Buffett is speeding up his exit from Berkshire Hathaway stock, pledging to dispose of his entire stake within roughly eight years while steering this year's charitable gifts entirely toward four foundations run by his own family.

In a release ssued Tuesday, Berkshire Hathaway confirmed that Buffett converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12,000,000 Class B shares, all of which will be donated across four charitable organizations.

The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late first wife, will receive 9,000,000 shares, worth roughly $4.5 billion. The Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the Novo Foundation will each receive 1,000,000 shares, worth just under $500 million apiece. The total package is valued at close to $6 billion.

Buffett said in the statement:

"My goal is to dispose of all of my Berkshire shares within about eight years. As I explained last year, my children are unfortunately growing older. I have every hope that the three of them are able to carry out the disposal of my shares by December 31, 2034. Of course, mortality is unpredictable, but my remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations one way or the other by December 31, 2034. The goal is to have the grants grow annually to each of the three foundations managed by each of my children and the annual grant to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation grow at a somewhat greater rate."

Following this transfer, Buffett's personal Berkshire holdings stand at 188,290 Class A shares and 1,162 Class B shares, a stake still worth more than $140 billion.

The scale of the gift marks a notable jump from prior years. CNBC noted that Buffett gave the four family foundations about $1.4 billion combined around this time last year, meaning this round represents more than a fourfold increase.

Broken pledge

Absent entirely from this year's distribution is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which received the bulk of Buffett's charitable stock for nearly two decades under a commitment he called "irrevocable" when he first made it in 2006.

At that time, Buffett promised annual gifts of Berkshire B shares for as long as either Bill Gates or Melinda French Gates remained alive and active in setting the charity's policy and running its operations.

Based on the reduction schedule Buffett laid out then, CNBC’s calculations show the foundation would have been due to receive shares worth close to $4.5 billion this cycle and it shows that over the nearly 20 years the arrangement ran, Buffett's donations to the Gates Foundation totaled close to $48 billion by the value of the shares at the time they were given, and now carry a current value of about $159 billion, although most of the stock has since been sold off by the foundation to fund its programs.

The Gates Foundation said in a statement published by the BBC:

"The Gates Foundation is grateful to Warren Buffett for his decades of support for our work. His gifts, totaling more than $47 billion, have helped us expand and deliver on the foundation's mission to improve health and opportunity for people around the world. The foundation continues from a position of financial strength to advance our work through 2045, supported by Bill's $200 billion commitment."

Buffett stepped down as a trustee of the foundation in 2021, two months after Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce, ending a 27-year marriage and in 2024 Buffett told the Wall Street Journal that the Gates Foundation would receive nothing from his estate, after revising his will to make his three children trustees of a charitable trust holding the vast majority of his fortune.

The relationship deteriorated further this year following the Justice Department's January release of files detailing Jeffrey Epstein's ties to people connected to Gates.