OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire Warren Buffett said Wednesday that his decision to cut the Gates Foundation out of his charitable giving is more about believing his three kids are ready to handle giving away his entire fortune than it is about Bill Gates’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Buffett told CNBC that Gates’ association with Epstein was “distasteful,” but the 95-year-old investor suggested that Gates’ actions weren’t much different from mistakes he himself had made over the years in hiring the wrong person or in choosing friends.
“No one bats a thousand in the business of choosing people,” Buffett said on CNBC.
Buffett read up on Gates’ ties to Epstein
Buffett said he “read a great deal since Jan. 1 in terms of what happened with Bill and Epstein. And I have read his remarks to Congress given under oath, and I read the cross-examination.” He noted that Gates eventually ended his relationship with Epstein.
Buffett said Gates wasn’t surprised by the decision Buffett announced Tuesday to eventually donate all the rest of his $140 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to foundations associated with his family and his three children, Howard, Susie and Peter. Gates flew to Omaha a few weeks ago and spent several hours talking with Buffett. The two hadn’t spoken much since before additional details about Gates and Epstein started to come out when the federal government began releasing files from the Epstein investigation.
Gates has said that he only met with Epstein because he thought it might help him raise money for charitable causes, and he didn’t know about Epstein’s ongoing crimes.
Epstein, who was accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls, was found dead at the Manhattan federal lockup in August 2019. His death was later ruled a suicide by New York City’s medical examiner.
Gates called Buffett “one of the greatest philanthropists of all time, and a dear friend” who he hopes to spend much more time with in the future.
“His wisdom, generosity, and deep sense of purpose have defined both his life and his philanthropy. His support for the Gates Foundation, at nearly $50 billion over the past twenty years, has been unprecedented, and it has helped save millions of lives,” Gates said in a statement.
Buffett said in 2024 that he planned to cut off donations to the Gates Foundation after he died and let his three children decide how to distribute the rest of his fortune.
The Gates Foundation will still have tremendous resources: its endowment was worth nearly $90 billion at the end of last year and Gates has promised to donate nearly all his remaining fortune to the foundation.
In other news from the CNBC interview, Buffett revealed that he recently broke his leg and underwent surgery for it, but he said he is recovering well.
Drastically increasing donations to give away his fortune by 2034
Buffett said he wants his own Berkshire shares to be distributed even quicker than he has previously indicated: by the end of 2034. To do that, he will have to drastically increase the amount he donates every year, to more than $17 billion annually.
Right now he is giving roughly $6 billion to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the foundations his children run: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the Novo Foundation. Buffett filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday afternoon that showed he had donated a total of 12 million Class B Berkshire shares a day earlier to those foundations.
The majority of that is going to the foundation named in honor of his late wife, which may quickly become one of the world’s largest such organizations. Buffett also traditionally gives additional gifts to his family foundations around Thanksgiving each year.
He has said that after his death, a new foundation will be created to distribute the rest of his shares and that his children will have to agree unanimously on where to donate them. He wants his children to be able to make those decisions before they die or become senile, and his oldest daughter will be nearly 81 in eight years.
Buffett’s donations may affect his successor’s support
The accelerated pace of Buffett’s plan to give away his fortune over the next eight years rather than doing it over the 10 years following his death will mean that his successor at Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel, won’t be able to count on the support of Buffett’s family as the company’s biggest shareholder for as long as he thought. Buffett currently controls nearly 30% of the voting power with his 188,290 Class A shares.
Nevertheless, Buffett said he believes it’s clear that Abel is the right man to lead the conglomerate he built, and “that becomes more evident by the day.”
However, Buffett did note that Berkshire’s big investment in Google’s parent company, which has grown in value considerably over the past year, is one he initiated and not an investment Abel picked, though Abel did agree on it. Just last month, Berkshire agreed to invest another $10 billion in Alphabet after previously tripling its stake in the company.
___
A previous version of this story misspelled Warren Buffett’s last name in the headline.
