Warren Buffett is donating an additional $5.3 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, his largest annual donation since he began giving in 2006.
Buffett’s donations bring his total charitable giving over the past two Novembers, including to charities run by his family, to about $57 billion.
The latest donation, announced Friday, includes about 13 million shares of Berkshire Class B stock.
Buffett has donated 9.93 million shares to the Gates Foundation, bringing his total Berkshire stock to more than $43 billion.
Buffett will also donate 993,035 shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after his late first wife, and 695,122 shares each to three charities led by his sons Howard, Susan and Peter: the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation and the Novo Foundation.
Buffett, 93, plans to give away more than 99 percent of the fortune he made from Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway, which he has run since 1965, with his children serving as executors.
Berkshire is a conglomerate with a market capitalization of about $880 billion that owns dozens of businesses, including BNSF Railway and Geico Auto Insurance Co., as well as stakes in companies like Apple.
Despite selling more than half his shares since 2006, Buffett still owns about one-seventh of Berkshire’s shares outstanding.
Before his latest donation, he was worth $134.3 billion, making him the eighth-richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
Buffett said in a statement that his investments, which totaled roughly $44 billion when the donations began, have been fueled by the benefits of compound interest, Berkshire’s “simple and generally sound capital allocation,” and “the combination of these two factors has allowed him to make the investment.”America’s Tailwind” has generated his current wealth.
Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates were also pioneers. Statement of CommitmentAs part of the project, 245 people, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Michael Bloomberg, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, have donated at least half of their wealth to charity.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation works in the area of reproductive health.
The Howard G. Buffett Foundation works to alleviate hunger, mitigate conflict, including in Ukraine, and improve public safety.
The Sherwood Foundation supports nonprofits in Nebraska, while the Novo Foundation focuses its efforts on girls and women.
