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I thought he was giving away 99% of his wealth?

Probably in a charitable trust that will be managed by the family. With the trust owning the shares.

He was giving it to the Gates Foundation for Bill & Melinda Gates to manage, but that deal went into limbo when Bill showed up in the Epstein files and Melinda divorced him.

The money he is giving away is going to foundations managed by his children (last I read).

That's recent, just as of the last couple months. Historically the children's foundations have been a sideshow and he's given the bulk of his wealth away to the Gates Foundation. You can see that from the dollar amounts: this year's gift to the children's foundations was 1M BRK-B shares (the equivalent of about $500M) to each, while he's given away a total of $66B, over 120x as much.

Though unlikely the case here, family foundations should always be looked at as a likely source of corruption.

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.

Even very large salaries are probably not a very significant amount of wealth for these people. I think this is a case where "all large numbers look the same."

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.

In this case yes. However that is not the case for all charities and so you need to look.

I wonder if they could even unwind the fortune to pay 40% in cash.

I believe they wouldn't have to because of the stepped-up-basis, but my point is that even if somehow they were paying the full 40%, it's still an inconceivably large amount of money.

Even if that kind of corruption isn't there, these charities are still a net negative for society. Why do the super rich rail against taxes but then donate all of their money to family foundations? There are multiple reasons. Pull on that thread.

It's more of a way to secure the fortune. You can't "secure" the personalities of all your offspring. If one of them gets out of line it could have disastrous consequences. Keeping it in a controlled institution boxes them in.

That’s now in limbo

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/warren-buffett-...

Plenty of other charities in the world. Just because he stopped giving to the Gates Foundation over Epstein ties doesn't mean he won't send the money somewhere else.

Sure. The thing with the Gates Foundation is that it was able to handle billions. Most charities aren't equipped to effectively manage and deploy that kind of wealth. The Gates Foundation made it easy for billionaires to send a large lump sum to one place that was equipped to deal with it.

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.

That's a good point but the Gates Foundation isn't alone; there are a fair number of other foundations in the $10-100 billion range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_charitable_...

None that operate at the scale of deployment that BMGF operates in.

Since the BMGF is only the fifth largest, how do you justify that statement?

Scale of deployment vs scale of funding.

Do you have a source? Because it seems unlikely to me that charitable foundations with even more capital are not deploying it at similar scale.

https://givingcompass.org/article/who-are-the-worlds-10-larg...

I don't think his son becoming Chairman has anything to do with how much of his wealth he's giving away.

Still leaves an absurd amount of wealth to manage.

Most of them seemingly have control problems where even if they do, it is in the form of a giant money pile still under their control that they give away the returns of, usually also completely under their control.

What's interesting is they cannot, but their ex partners go much further in their giving (Melinda French, MacKenzie Scott, for example).

I wonder if there's a survivorship bias there: those who can and do reject the status quo.

My hot take is that men with extreme wealth and power are desperate to keep it as part of their identity, where the women I mentioned do not have the same character and personality flaws, and therefore use it as a tool to do good because they are not optimizing for status, power, and wealth: they are optimizing to do good. Doesn't always hold, there are exceptions.

"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

One giant exception was Chuck Feeney, who made $8 billion on duty free shops and gave almost all of it away, much of it anonymously. By the end of his life he and his wife had a couple million and lived in a rented apartment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Philanthropies

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Great human, thanks for mentioning.

Giving away your fortune in secret is so much more virtuous than doing it with a giant foundation with your name on it. Much respect.

When they agreed in Nashville to rename the airport after Dolly Parton, all of the people commenting on the TV clip said it was well-deserved.

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.

There's a difference in men and women... until there's not. Very convenient.

There's a large body of medical research around women having more empathy than men, specifically around brain volume in the inferior frontal gyrus. Does it always hold? There are always exceptions. Broadly speaking, in most cases, it is a function of brain structure, per person. Do you have many examples of exceptional wealthy and powerful women who are monsters? I do not. I welcome corrections and citations, and am happy to be proven wrong on this.

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)

I know what you mean, nobody in North America understands vive la différence outside of French Canadians and Louisiana Cajuns.

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 more likely is that bill and Jeff built their wealth through their businesses, which they are still directly involved in. Giving away their wealth would be equivalent to giving away the business they built from the ground up

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.

I agree that Bill and Jeff are better at exploitation at scale. That’s how you become that wealthy. We are lucky they’re divorced and the wealth is in the hands of better stewards to distribute it to do good.

I agreed right off the bat, they definitely reached scale like few others, but maybe it might have been the way they grew without stopping more so than today's well-known scaling process that got them there.

Doubtless they got in position early to take advantage of many potential upswings.

That's what it's about though. The amount THEY can give, not the benefit to humanity.

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.

Bezos didn't build Amazon? First I heard of that

> Giving away their wealth would be equivalent to giving away the business they built from the ground up

On the backs of the government and its people's tax money with nothing given back.

That is because the exes were not people who had the same drive for money and power. They did not need to cling on to more than they would ever spend.

Well he's not dead yet.

That is what I told the tax man...they did not buy it...

He has. His family manages the foundation that owns BRK stock.

Isn’t that the usual loophole though? He definitely continues to donate large amounts but I always question setting up a trust that the kids run.

Right, donating your present wealth because you expect to continue receiving an astronomical amount of wealth in perpetuity through your company ownership is not all that grand of a gesture.

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).

This makes sense as long as public control makes the outcome of that money better than letting the bazillionare control it. I'm not sure which way the actual truth tilts, but I suspect it's sometimes one and sometimes the other.

It’s not really a “loophole,” it’s a standard way to give away absurd sums of money.

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?).

Sure that is the typical way to donate your wealth but there are many other ways than giving it with control to your children. I have no judgement but doing it this way is a nice way to move money within your family.

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!

Can you just as easily pick a quorum of folks? It seems to me that no matter what, you're going to have to choose people you know and be accused of nepotism because those are the people you can actually assess, and in the case of children, hopefully raise/influence to be on the same page as you.

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?

Easy is relative but someone in his position with decades of experience working with talented individuals, yes. Nothing is perfect but I have seen other foundations structured where it’s a mixture of descendants and leaders that worked with the individuals. We are going to be picking at hairs though since this is all anecdotal and we don’t know how it will play out. Some of kids foundation work has been a bit self-serving but it’s there money to spend. It could also just as easily be that the 3 kids are different enough that requiring all three to agree prevents most of the opportunity.

If it's so difficult, maybe they could take the easy option and, you know, properly fund the government to build the shared infrastructure on which we all rely by paying tax proportional to their wealth.

https://www.investopedia.com/warren-buffett-paid-billions-to...

Warren Buffet made the largest single tax payment in US history last year. He doesn't play any games.

You mean fund ICE and build some more concentration camps?

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.

Or maybe, just maybe, a system that doesn't create massive concentration of wealth won't try to divert people's focus by pitting people against each other and building concentration camps. Governments aren't fundamentally wasteful. In fact, an effective government is an absolute requirement for functioning healthcare, fair wages, consumer protection, and actual public safety that protects all people equally.

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.

Cool. Give me a call when our government isn't wasteful and destructive, then we can talk about the relative benefits of taxes versus charity.

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.

Fixing government and taxing the rich is the only solution that addresses the core of the issue. Charities can't close wealth gaps, because they lack the power to enforce laws that ensure fair labor and trade practices. Charities can't stop the healthcare industry from bankrupting sick or injured people, because that too requires enforcing the law. Charities can't stop concentration camps.

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.

Still leaves $1.5b, that's a hell of an income if you stick it in any widespread passive fund, and still 100 times more than even the 1% mark in the US.

It bothers me how he and other billionaires think that it's all worth it letting them get so rich because they "give it away". It's almost insulting.

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.

1% of $140 billion is still $1.4 billion.

Can he give me a few million then?

And me please. 2 mill.

Few million?

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.

For what it is worth, if you want your withdrawals to last for decades, then you are limited to around a yearly inflation-adjusted cap of around 3% of the original principal per year, gross of taxes, if you invest in low-cost passive index funds. That is a budget of $30K/year for every million you have invested in the market.

If you are interested, the /r/fire and /r/financialindependence subreddits are useful.

> 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.

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.

This is the biggest argument for socialism, you pay the taxes, get free health care and free education, every one gets the same irrespective of their status. Why do Americans get scared every time they hear "socialism"? Is it because billionaires have told them it's like "communism"? Are they so brainwashed they can't vote for policies to enable this sort of thing? No wonder the life expectancy in the US is lower than in Europe.

> pondering how absurd amount of money…

You may enjoy reading Brewster’s Millions, or watching one of the many movie adaptations made over the years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewster's_Millions

Rich people donate for tax and the ultra-rich donate without actually donating it :)

he is giving 99% to the buffet family foundation ofc

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