I guess Warren’s quote only applies to other people, not him. "It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics." (https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/us/dozens-of-rich-america...)
I would be set for the rest of my life if I got half a mill falling from sky today, I guess I could even make it work with 250k.
Currently I am pondering how absurd amount of money a billion of dollars is. When loads of people can only -earn and eat through/spend not save- $1 million; working their asses off for something like 20 years.
If you are interested, the /r/fire and /r/financialindependence subreddits are useful.
Maybe you only have a few years left to live? If not, I’m not sure where one can live on $10,000 to $15,000 a year and pay for shelter, food, clothing, and healthcare. It costs more than that per year for health insurance for one adult over 40 in the US.
That is what $500k grants you, chop those in half for $250k.
You may enjoy reading Brewster’s Millions, or watching one of the many movie adaptations made over the years.
You cannot bribe me directly - that would be caught. However you can donate money to my family foundation and my kids (or spouse) will draw a large salary from it while doing almost nothing and they do some good for the world so it looks like a charity. Of course the kids/spouse will support me in various ways that all rich kids will.
Again, probably not what is happening here, but every time you hear of a family foundation you should ask who they are using it to corruption in some form. Even when it doesn't seem to be you should still look.
If Warren just directly gave his money to his three children equally, and paid 40% inheritance tax on that money, and then the children each just used 1% of that wealth per year, then they'd each get:
144000000000 * 0.6 / 3 / 100 = $288 million each year.
No foundation pays its CEO 10% of that much money. I think we may have to accept that in fact this is a way to give money to charitable causes, not just horde it.
Certainly better than many alternatives, but it’s not a gesture that should make the median income person feel like existing as an excessively wealthy person should be okay/legal.
In my opinion, personal wealth/asset control above a certain level deemed excessive (perhaps $100 million then adjusted for inflation moving forward) should be taxed at 100% and put into a special fund intended to help pay for social services, healthcare, housing the homeless, etc. In the case of asset control perhaps a good method would be to distribute excessively valued ownership stakes to employees or random members of the public (e.g., many of Elon Musk’s shares in his companies forfeited and distributed to others).
Have you ever tried to donate billions of dollars? It’s actually extremely difficult.
You have to find causes you’re passionate about/things that society needs, find the correct charities to give the money to, make sure your money actually goes towards the thing they say it will (this is difficult), and then figure out how much you can actually donate (you can’t just give N dollars to company Y. They’ve got zero experience managing that much money, and no way to scale into doing it efficiently.)
What happens then is you have $100b to donate, and mostly only do it $10m at a time or less.
Warren’s kids are old now. They’ve all been donating money for YEARS (it’s a mandatory part of their trust).
So yeah, you receive tax benefits by transferring shares to a foundation you also control, but that money is now earmarked for charity. It doesn’t flow both ways, and the laws on this are very tight (bad actors will find a way, but what’s new?).
Everyone does it different and I have no judgement but you could just as easily pick a quorum of folks to do the job with a very explicit timeline. Charitable donations are quite broad in the US. So sure lots of wealthy folk don’t this way but not everyone!
You could always donate it to the US government, but then it'll be used to go start some wars, so that won't work. You could put it in some weird trust where random people can democratically decide what to do with it, but all you have to do is look at the government to see how good of decisions that leads to. So truly what's the alternative?
Approximately 1% of the federal budget is infrastructure. There are huge advantages to donating to a charity that actually does something productive instead of the federal waste machine.
This isn't to diminish all the good things charities have done, but charities are fundamentally band-aid solutions to a dysfunctional society. Leaving welfare at the mercy of wealthy individuals as the wealth gap keeps getting bigger and bigger is a losing strategy. It shouldn't be the state of things people should be aiming for.
Until then, I'm going to look at the real world and conclude that charities do massively more good
Pretending that reality is other than it is nothing short of delusion, living in a fantasy.
Charities do have a place in society and they can do enormous good, but can't compensate for a poor government.
Frankly, the notion that government is fundamentally ineffective and only the private sector can fix things is billionaire propaganda. Billionaires undermine government so they can exploit working-class people with fewer constraints. Then they'd use charity to launder their reputation while pushing their own agenda.
Deriding calls for fair taxes and claiming charities will fix things is wishful thinking at best.
"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority." -- Lord Action
Some were more emotional than others, but one of the proponents was very touched, she admired Parton so much because Dolly set an example of how to be as successful as a person can be, and not keep a billion for yourself.
I can't find the clip now, but it was from the heart.
TLDR Show me the brain fMRI and I will show you the soul. In some cases, facial structure is enough for weak but meaningful signal (as a proxy for brain structure).
(politics are also brain structure, citations in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48634883)
And some of them only at their own convenience.
I wouldn't let it bother me, son of a gun I'm gonna have big fun on the bayou :)
edit: not my downvote btw
I think there's also a question of efficacy. Bill and Jeff are really good at turning $1 into $10. Melinda and Mackenzie? Not so much. If bill or Jeff wanted to maximize the amount they can give, the best strategy would be for them to continually earn until they die, and then donate it.
Doubtless they got in position early to take advantage of many potential upswings.
It's not like Bill and Jeff actually built any of these products themselves. Microsoft bought DOS. Right place, right time for that Nepo baby. Bezos at least had a normal family.
On the backs of the government and its people's tax money with nothing given back.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/warren-buffett-...
Having to part out all his wealth $5m at a time to spread it around without overwhelming the systems in place, would be a second act that I'm not sure Buffett has the time for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...
You know who could have used all that money all this time? The people you leeched it away from via this thing known as taxes and a functioning government. But no, let's give it away to private foundations who will serve only their needs.
Not exactly, he's there to oversee the culture of Berkshire and ensure it's continuity. Buffett is donating all of his wealth (and has already donated $66B), so there isn't a fortune to protect.
Berkshire is an institution of sorts at this point, and requires strong stewardship to prevent enshittification (for lack of a better word).
- to prevent institutional degradation.
- to avoid cultural shift for the worse.
- to keep hold of and nurture that culture.
He was elected by the board too, rather than directly placed by Warren.
I don’t think the last name hurt his chances in 1993 either.
He wasn't wrong.
The article you’re picking the quote from is about estate taxes.
that's the point of the effort after all.
warren as smart as he is was tryna go against the grain of thousands of human evolution. if you train your kids - then most likely they would've values similar to yours. hit or miss but most times a hit.
The other downside of nepotism -- besides the risk that Joe did a shit job and won't admit it or maybe can't evaluate his kid objectively -- is that even if the kid is the bee's knees, a great hire, it's not really fair -- there's almost certainly other candidates who are just as good and trustworthy as Joe's kid but they can't compete with either Joe's kid. It doesn't really matter what sort of references or credentials a candidate can show you if you can serve as a reference for the other candidate. You can't really run a meritocracy like that.
if your biological child is an idiot/wasteman - then you could adopt - the Roman Empire ran on adopted children, with biological children seen as wasteman.
the other way it's done e.g with Japanese businesses - again adopt your son in law and give him your surname.
the thing about giving helm to the sons - is usually you would've had a whole lifetime to evaluate the candidate 20+ years. do mistakes happen yeah, but honestly the risk is overblown.
where that's true or not, that's not what happened. this is more like "there's nothing wrong with trying to help your son in his career and getting him a job."
Berkshire Hathaway's market cap is a trillion, and Warren Buffet's net worth has never been close to that, i.e. it's not his company so he's not leaving it to his son to run.
You might admire Warren Buffet's acumen and think he'd be good at picking people, but all (for varying values of all) parents believe in their children so it's not easy to tell if you'd be getting his best advice in this case if you were another major shareholder in Berkshire.
I never saw our CEO in person, never saw our chairman even on a webinar.
And yes it's not their job to be that low level, but they can't have an idea of the culture either.
The importance of top executive decisions is overstated, they often do no better than random chance. But their decisions are not where their value lies.
The important part is that they own their decisions, or at least appear to do so. And in doing that, they gain trust for the company, they are the company face. It is more of a performance than a technical job. By that, I don't mean it is fake, people will notice if you don't know what you are talking about, and it won't inspire confidence, which is what leaders try to avoid at all costs.
LLMs will probably be at least as good at decision making (I mean, that's almost a dice roll), and they can be convincing, which is important too, but they are completely lacking in the trust department. No one want to work for a machine, no one want to do business negotiations with a machine either. That's why it is important to have a human on top.
Here's his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Graham_Buffett
You think he didn't teach his children anything about finance?
IDK, maybe I'm a mushbrain but it seems like if someone said they're the chairman of the board, and you told them to their face "well it's not like you run the company..." they'd finish their drink and go talk to someone else for the rest of the night.
It's not as rewarding to consider that you've reached your position by more good luck than effort, so you hand down advice from on high because clearly you're smarter than everyone else (doesn't help that many people treat you this was to gain access).
Then you continue to do whatever you want despite your own advice because of course... you're smarter than everyone else.