Warren Buffett is no longer donating his money at death to the Gates Foundation
axios.com
axios.com
For this argument to work, you have to stop at the donor themselves - you can't keep extending it ad infinitum to their descendants or inheritors. But in the case of the pre-committed amounts, like Gates and Buffett, that isn't the case.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/28/buffett-donates-another-5poi...
Based on his article, his children seem very locally oriented rather than global visionaries.
If I was him, I would not leave this to my kids, who may never agree on much, and then there is zero impact and the pile of cash just sits there doing nothing.
The Scottish billionaire Tom Hunter (who go rich from selling shoes) hired a team of 30 who spent a decade working of charitable giving (spending Tom's one billion pounds donation, which if I remember correctly was at least at the time the largest one in UK history).
What pile of cash?
These are shares. Buffett and Munger have taken great pains to ensure that capital allocation will be done well at Berkshire after their death.
There’s no “pile of cash sitting there doing nothing”.
Objectively, his kids have not demonstrated any capability to do something of this magnitude. It's really quite disappointing to see Warren mostly backtrack on what he's always said (around nepotism and leaving staggering sums to future generations among other things).
You'd think even if this is related to Gate's Epstein connection, he would still recognized the importance of using his net worth for maximum good.
Maybe the human instinct to leave your possessions to your children is too strong for even Warren to fight.
It's really quite depressing watching the fiasco of how Mackenzie Bezos is donating her fortunes and what seems likely to come from Buffet's children. So many resources created+collected by brilliant people and then squandered by their loved ones.
He might just be making a mistake, but it is also possible that the longer he looked at charitable organizations generally, the less impressed he was. Also, he may not have much time, and having something in place now is better than having nothing.
Personally I think the best use of such a fortune, 100bn say, it to invest $1m into $1m high potential new small businesses and startups.
That would create the most wealth for the most people.
You could even decide to pick one poor country with reasonable governance, and use 10 percent of the money for oversight and assessing merits of which business proposals to fund.
Imagine a million new businesses across Africa, or across India or across countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines each got funded with 1m usd.
Imagine how many jobs would be created, how much long term economic impact there would be.
Even assuming 80 percent of the funded businesses fail, 200,000 successful new businesses, plus another 800k entrepreneurs who all learned a valuable lesson and gained a ton of experience.