Warren Buffett has given his three children an astonishing $143.1billion task that his eldest son says is ‘not so easy.’
The 94-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway has decided to donate his entire fortune to a charitable trust after his death, which his three children – Howard, 69, Susie, 71, and Peter, 66 – will be in charge of.
They will have just 10 years to allocate all of the money to charities of their choice, according to the Associated Press.
‘It’s not so easy to give away money if you want to do it smart, if you want to be intelligent about it,’ said Howard, a farmer who is to take over as Berkshire Hathaway’s nonexecutive chairman upon his father’s death.
‘It’s pretty amazing that he’s given us this opportunity,’ he added.
Howard went on to say he and his siblings would continue to follow their father’s lead and take risks, while trying to find ways to make a difference.
‘I can tell you, we’ll sit down in a room when the time comes, and we’ll get it figured out pretty quickly,’ he said.
‘What this is going to do is we’re going to bring all of our collective experience together.’
Howard also said he agrees with his father’s decision to allocate the hundreds of billions of dollars.
In general, he said he believes that wealthy people should give their money away within their lifetimes, rather than holding them in perpetual foundations.
‘Somebody is going to spend that money. Somebody is going to give that money away.
‘So I would rather do that with my brother and sister and do it together as a partnership, than see it done any other way.’
It remains unclear what organizations the siblings might donate the fortune to, but they have each run their own foundations from which they have donated more than $15billion of their father’s money since 2006.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, of which Susie is the chairman of the board and Peter is a board member, has donated $8.4billion mainly to reproductive health care organizations.
It also funds access to abortion contraception, granting hundreds of millions of dollars over the years to Planned Parenthood affiliates, the National Abortion Federation and Population Services International – which works outside of the United States.
Susie’s Sherwood Foundation has also been a major funder for early childhood education programs, and its largest grantee is the nonprofit Buffett Early Childhood Fund, which has granted hundreds of millions of dollars for research, advocacy, training and support for child care providers.
The Howard G Buffett Foundation, meanwhile, supports food security and conflict mitigation internationally.
It has partnered with the Catholic Relief Services, which it has funded for at least 15 years to support farmers in Central America.
‘Howard was particularly interested in addressing the factors that were driving people to leave rural communities in Central America and Mexico and risk everything to migrate to the US,’ Erica Dahl-Bredine, a senior advisor for Catholic Relief Services, explained.
‘And that’s where our vision really came together.’
Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, have focused their grant-making efforts on supporting girls around the world and social-emotional learning in schools.
Since 2002, though, the couple’s foundation has increased its support for Native American organizations, which the younger Buffett became interested in since he composed some of the music for the film Dances With Wolves and wrote the score for the miniseries 500 Nations.
For now, however, Buffett will continue to donate to the Gates Foundation annually – something he has done since 2006 to the tune of more than $40billion.
He will also continue to donate to his family’s own charities, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2022 his fortune ‘should be used to help the people that haven’t been as lucky as we have been.
‘There’s eight billion people in the world and me and my kids, we’ve been the luckiest 100th of one percent or something.
‘There’s lots of ways to help people,’ he added.
Buffett is currently the sixth richest person in the world, behind Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg and Bernard Arnault.