Summary
Warren Buffett gave $1.1 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock to family foundations and detailed plans for distributing his $147 billion fortune after his death.
His three children will oversee giving the remainder within 10 years, with designated successors in case they predecease him.
Buffett, 94, reaffirmed his belief in avoiding dynastic wealth, favoring philanthropy instead.
Over the years, he has donated $55 billion to the Gates Foundation but plans to shift focus to his family’s foundations.
Buffett continues leading Berkshire Hathaway while preparing Greg Abel as his successor.
I once met a wealth manager for a billionaire whose entire job was to donate money as effectively as possible, focusing on infrastructure and education projects in Central and South America. She explained that the challenges are often unexpected.
For example, most smaller local organizations struggle to absorb large sums of money efficiently. Take, for instance, a group that builds homes for those in need. A sudden donation of millions of dollars can be too difficult to manage efficiently. So they try to be mindful of local needs, build trust, and build long-term partnerships.
So, why not just support many small communities? Well, a billion dollars could fund a thousand 1 million$ projects. That’s why this billionaire hired multiple wealth managers just to handle donations. That chat changed my perspective on how difficult it can be to give away large amounts of money.
Still, I’d rather them pay fair taxes.
I was about to say, they should just pay taxes, after all this is what government is for.
Yeah, I was very disappointed in Bill Gates for being pro-philanthropy but against higher taxation. That said, Gates and Buffet don’t get the final say. The American people just elected an anti-tax fraudulent billionaire.
But if they donate enough then we will never force them to give up all their excess wealth.
And they like having excess wealth, a lot, like most rich people have hoarding mental disorders.
None of them really want to better society, they just want us to not rip all their skin off and redistribute their wealth so our economies benefit everyone again.
Nah, I don’t like that. That’s bad. Everybody should have to pay a share to fund public available necessities and uplift people as equals. It’s not optional, it being optional demonstrably does not work, and even if it did we shouldn’t rely on faith and goodwill.
Billionaires should be illegal.
It reminds me of this thing I read where countries would give all these donated designer clothes to some country, only for it to collapse their economy because making clothes was one of the only jobs available there.
They definitely need to pay their fair share of taxes. But even that wouldn’t be enough. People will always demand more be done.
“Dragon gives away hoard after death. That will fix all the lives he ruined, right?”
How did he ruin lives? Didn’t he mostly make his money playing stocks and investing in stuff?
Lemmy, in general, thinks anyone with money is evil, and their money was sucked from the teets of the poor. It’s sort of annoying. Not just super wealthy people, either. If you have any sort of investment that increases in value over time, you’re a bad person. That money should have gone to poor people, somehow.
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Meh, that’s an oversimplification. Mutual funds don’t go around taking money from workers, but the tankies (and whoever else they can convince) think it’s clever to go around saying that. Simple minds, maybe?
It’s a complicated system, and I’d like to see a LOT of change. There has been a lot of change in some states, but it’d be nice to get the national minimum wage increased.
The wrong guy was voted in. Anti-union, anti-worker, anti-everything. Just a big piece of garbage.
It’s just annoying that of all the solutions out there, Lemmy users somehow decided to latch on to “uhhh, stocks steal money directly from workers! How else would the stock price go up?”
He had nothing to do with stealing it, though. I had stock in AMD for a while and it made some money. Did that make the people at amd poor? In that company’s case they would have filed for bankruptcy over 15 years ago. Investors kept the business alive. Same for Apple in the 90’s.
Yes, all most really care about is making money, but that doesn’t change if there is or isn’t a stock market.
The money investors get, just by owning the stock, is produced by people working with the stuff the investors money bought. The money isn’t supposed to go to “poor people somehow” it’s supposed to go to the people doing the work.
Are the workers not poor? Isn’t that the whole argument?
Anyway, maybe it’s a mutual benefit. When people buy stocks, it’s a quick infusion of cash to a company, and the company can then spend money on producing stuff, hiring people, etc.
Would you rather companies get loans from banks instead?
There are so many other solutions to low wages.
Yes the workers are generally poorer than the investors. But that’s not the point here, the point is that it’s in its essence an unfair system where you are forced to work for someone else’s profit unless you are wealthy enough to yourself be an investor that can live from their investments returns.
Getting monetary benefits should come from work and not ownership.
Again, this isn’t really about low or high wages it’s about the extraction of money from the workers towards owners without any work being done by the owners.
The common image people conjure to justify this are the small shops built by someone and then being employing some staff. You must realize though that that isn’t the biggest chunk of wealth and not the really problematic part of the system.
The biggest chunk of wealth is concentrated on a few percent of the population and it’s mostly inherited not built up by themselves. And it’s here where we actually see wealth being extracted from the workers.
That’s literally how wealth accumulates.
He’s given billions already.
if I take 100 dollars from you and give back 10 to random people, does that seem fair?
How did he take 100 from me, though? If I bought shares of Intel and made $100, how is it that I took it from you?
You pay taxes, they don’t. Their risks and lifestyle are subsidized, yours isn’t.
You are paying for his lifestyle and if you stop doing it the police come for you.
Also just wage theft generally.
Berkshire Hathaway hasn’t paid taxes?
Did he use his money to change tax laws? He didn’t create the crooked tax system. You aren’t going out of your way to pay more, either.
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None of that is Warren Buffet. You can’t just say all stock holders are evil thieves. Stock holders are the reason many of those businesses exist.
Side note: did you actually know how much the rail workers were already being paid before the strike? It was better than most jobs by a fair amount. They didn’t have sick time because it was already previously negotiated away for other things in a previous contract.
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Yeah…rail workers average $74k a year and get 30 days vacation a year. What do you get?
*Edit:Also, I did a bit of digging. He does now own one railroad company. He only got it 14 years ago. He didn’t make his money as one of the railroad tycoons.
A good example is wage theft. Employees are not paid the value they produce. Instead of bonuses or fair salaries the company gives out dividends, etc.
Fuck Warren Buffett. He’s just another scumbag who has soaked up wealth by taking full advantage of neoliberal economics. There are no good billionaires.
People are so stupid, they look at that figure and go “147 billion. Huh”
That cunt is a fucking greedy evil bastard and is literally causing children to starve to death because people can’t afford food. This evil shit has $18 for every man, woman and child on earth. Think about that.
I’m not some sort of reactionary but I’m astonished how people don’t realise just how much suffering these evil fuckwits are causing.
Burn the cunt on a stake
Fuckin’ amen.
The only correct response honestly.
This fucker, and everyone else should not ever have $147 billion to give away, or anywhere close to it.
I’d argue it isn’t his money anyway. These psychos have concocted a system of capitalism that is inherently theft and exploitation. The wealth is dependent on the masses who are kept poor as wage slaves stuck in a perpetual cycle of produce and consume. Which most of us cannot escape.
The masses are the cement and rebar foundation for the billionaires wealth.
Honestly, it ain’t his money to give away. I wish people would realize this.
Why wait? There is functionally no difference between $1b and $147b. He would get to see the fruits of his efforts if he spends it now.
Because if it takes 10 years to donate that much and the market stays at its 10 year average growth they stand to have something like 190b dollars left when they are done donating that 149b.
With that logic he should give it to Jeff Bezos so he can keep growing it after he’s gone.
As long as the promise is on the horizon and they don’t ever pay up then poor idiots will keep making excuses for them to not dump their ill gotten gains back into the system they stole it from!
It’s the same promise gates has made for decades. I am going to donate all of it. And he has donated billions, but taxes are low enough on the rich, and loop holes are big enough that even while they give away money, they still make shit tons more.
Example, Gates left Microsoft in 2008 and just runs his charity, where he has given away billions, like almost 6 billion in 2022 alone. His net worth was 58 billion in 2008, it is now around 107 billion.
He has almost doubled his net worth, while donating more money than anyone can ever spend, annually.
You’re completely neglecting the fact that he still has Microsoft stock… plus, he’s certainly holding stock in other companies. It’s disingenuous to say that his increase in net worth between 2008 and 2024 is solely due to the money he’s donated.
For what it’s worth, I’m not pro Bill Gates or billionaires - I just feel like it’s important to speak factually when trying to address an issue.
No it’s the stocks and investments that make the money. Just as I was saying above. The 150b they are in charge of giving away over 10 years stands to make money back for them.
75b 10% interest over 10 years - 194b. The 10 year average of the stock market was actually 11% growth annually though… so a little over 200b is what they may make donating his 150b.
That’s why it’s a 10 year span to give it away is what I was getting at. They could hold it and make a shit ton more, but in reality this way they look like good people for giving it “all” away, get tax breaks and make money
Sorry, I misunderstood your previous comment. Thanks for the clarification. I agree that these charitable donations from billionaires are basically just positive PR stunts because there’s essentially no tangible cost to them.
Yarp. Talked elsewhere about it somewhere the other day.
If Musk does nothing but leave his money right now invested. His 380b would be over 1T in that same 10 year time period.
Given his age, he’s got about 35 years of life left, that would be around 14.6T if it grows at the same 11% annual rate.
So when he dies his money would be making about 4 billion dollars a day. (It would break out entire economy)
Just for giggles, that’s over $46,000 a second
I feel like you are inventing the concept of an endowment from first principles.
What do you mean?
I’m pretty sure his foundations and the Gates stuff both are specifically designed to be left with zero money at the end.
I have no idea how money works at large scale, so I guess I have a question for anybody who knows
Could that much money being distributed cause problems with the “economy”? My naive understanding is that the “economy” is (more or less) money moving around. Could hoarded wealth entering circulation cause any kind of problems?
I know my question is already sort of flawed since hoarded wealth isn’t exactly sitting still, but I don’t know if that makes a difference
Because his true passion in life is turning money into more money. This is what he does, he doesn’t buy yachts, or sports teams, or politicians, he just makes more money. He lives very modestly actually, still lives in his same little house and gets like a mcdonald’s value meal for breakfast before work every day, he’s an interesting guy.
(I’m not absolving him of the moral sins inherent in having and acquiring that kind of wealth, I’m just answering the question)
He’s entered the Rockefeller stage of his life. Build a bunch of community shelters or rebuild America’s railroad network or something useful, Warren.
There comes a certain point where wealth ceases to be a blessing, and managing it becomes a full time occupation. I can respect this decision.
All the more reason to level the playing field, eh?
I would respect it more if I wasn’t so jaded, perhaps. But there’s been just too many charity foundations involved in scandals of one type or another.
So, yes, let’s level the playing field! I’m with you there…
He signed the giving pledge with Bill Gates shortly after its creation.
No shit. What else would he do with it? Cling on to his fortunes while descending into the particular pits of the underworld?
That is Elon’s plan.
Bury it with himself. Ironically, that’d probably do more good than whatever redistribution he’s planning.
Dude could randomly give 147,000 people 1 million dollars but he’s more likely to just give it to charities that his buds or family will benefit from.
Buffett gives money to Bill Gates to avoid dynastic wealth. Hmm
Not Bill Gates, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “The primary stated goals of the foundation are to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty across the world, and to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology in the U.S.”.
Meh. His arguments boil down to “isn’t the government better at spending money?” and “Rich people are bad, they shouldn’t be rich!”. None of his points really have anything to do with these foundations.
The government isn’t “better” at spending money. They have a LOT more of it to spend, though. If the US Government got some tax revenue from, say, inheritance tax when Warren Buffet dies, I don’t see how Congress is going to say “oh nice, a couple more billion dollars to go in our trillions of dollars budget, lets spend it on education”. They’re going to spend it on military or whatever. People lobby congress to spend money and make laws that benefit their company/industry. So that cancels out more than half of his 5 minute video for me.
The beginning of his video talks about how the media portrays it, which is a different subject.
Rich people being rich is an entirely different subject. They are rich, and you can’t go back in time and change that. So that cancels out another minute or two of his video.
He tries to make a point about how they only have to spend 5% of their money every year, like that’s somehow bad? Compare it to a person in retirement: If someone starts with some money in their retirement account with 4% interest (and 3% inflation), if they withdraw 5% of their balance every year, they’ll run out of money. The Gates foundation has a plan to spend a lot more than that after they die. They’re not required to, sure, but why should they be?
All in all, I still fail to see how this strategy is bad for society overall. Argue all you want that there shouldn’t be any individuals with this amount of money, but that’s a different subject.
The government isn’t “better” at spending money.
The government is elected, oligarchs are not. Governments certainly can waste a lot of money, but they can be frugal too. For instance, expense ratios for Medicare are just a small fraction of private health insurance. Meanwhile, Bill Gates spent a fortune bending the American educational standards to confirm with his political philosophy and, by his own auditor’s conclusions it raised costs for everyone while degrading educational outcomes.
Without embracing the idea that billionaires are somehow just better at everything than most citizens, there is no reason to think they should have seriously outsized influence on public policy. Anyone paying attention today would be insane to conclude that our system is any kind of meritocracy.
If billionaires want to spend their money on charitable causes, I think that is great. The problem comes in when they use foundations to hide their money from taxes, starve the government of revenue, then backfill the deficiencies with systems designed to drive even more money to the top. Charitable contributions beyond what most people can make should not be tax deductable. Billionaires should pay what they owe, then can choose to be charitable with the rest.
If you think these massive foundations are earning 4% interest, you are out of your mind. The S&P500 index averages well over 10%. Private equity does even better than that.
Ok, then change it to 10% and do the same math. If it goes up 10%, loses 3% to inflation, and they’re required to spend 5%, that leaves a 2% return. Next year they’ll have 2% more money, so 5% of that is even more… etc.
I was just saying Adam in the video makes it sound like 5% is bad?, without saying why it should be higher.
RMDs for some personal retirement accounts are in the same ballpark of 5%. Should people in retirement be required to withdraw more?
Ok, then change it to 10% and do the same math.
The Nasdaq has been above 16% but, again, that’s nothing compared to what private equity can earn - especially when paired with political connections. Earning 2% after inflation and expenditures means the principal must never be touched, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that the tax deductions happen immediately while spending the money back into the economy is postponed indefinitely.
RMDs for some personal retirement accounts are in the same ballpark of 5%. Should people in retirement be required to withdraw more?
For some accounts yes, but as people age that percentage goes up based on life expectancy and can go much higher than 5%.
Charity is great and should be encouraged, but effectively taking money out of the treasury to fund private charity gives the ultra wealthy an extreme level of undue influence over the rest of us. You and I don’t get to decide exactly how our personal taxes are used, and neither should a billionaire. How that money is spent is a collective decision through our government representatives, and nobody should have massively outsized influence. I would go further and say that any wealth over $10m should start running into an exponentially curved wealth tax that makes accumulation beyond $100m near impossible. (Obviously those marks are arbitrary, but I think that’s a good range for today’s dollar.) Wealth hordes of over $100m are really only useful for controlling society in order to collect even more money, whether it’s spent on buying politicians, controlling markets, or disseminating propaganda.
Riiiiight. Like the Clinton foundation!
What’s wrong with the Clinton Foundation?
Beginning in 2015, the foundation was accused of wrongdoing, including a bribery and pay-to-play scheme, but multiple investigations through 2019 found no evidence of malfeasance. The New York Times reported in September 2020 that a federal prosecutor appointed by attorney general Bill Barr to investigate the origins of the 2016 FBI Crossfire Hurricane investigation had also sought documents and interviews regarding how the FBI handled an investigation into the Clinton Foundation.[16] In May 2023, it was revealed that the Justice Department had continued to investigate the Foundation until days before the end of the Trump presidency, when FBI officials insisted the DOJ acknowledge in writing that there was no case to bring.[17]
Nothing. Just billionaires passing money back and forth under a non-profit label. Nothing to see here.
Good argument.
Yes that is the goal they State and the propaganda they write.
Everyone hates billionaires for hoarding their money, but then it’s also a problem when they’re giving it away to charity.
Billionaires suck and shouldn’t exist, but they do. I know this is going to get downvoted to hell because it seems a majority of the users here can’t stand anything remotely positive being said about billionaires. But guys - it’s an isolated good thing when billionaires give away large sums of their money to charitable causes. Doesn’t mean that they shouldnt pay more in taxes, or that they’re wonderful people, or that they accumulated their wealth in moral ways. All of these things can be true at the same time.
The question for me is what charities and how they are chosen. What demographics are the charities intending to assist, and who are they potentially intending to exclude? Even through charity, billionaires can push agendas and affect who receives privileges and who doesn’t.
Governments are also often guilty of favoring funding towards their favorite causes. Not defending billionaires here, but pouring money into mediatic causes, while ignoring or underfunding less visible causes is definitely a thing.
The trouble is that billionaires who remain sympathetic to Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth” are vanishing, while narcissists who see themselves as American oligarchs are proliferating. It isn’t hard to see how dynasties could be more politically powerful on a long timescale.
Many would call this a natural progression, and for my part I don’t envy whoever ends up on the other side of that debate - money being the root of all evil.
Write everyone in the US cheque for ~$400
He should give it to Bernie
So all those articles saying he sold to be in cash because market crash was coming were completely off
Anyway I can email him asking for a couple hundred thousand? Drop in the bucket, he wouldn’t even notice, yet my life would be changed forever.
Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure there will be an uptick in emails of “spokespersons” reaching out to you personally to bring the news you have been personally selected in sharing the wealth.
They just need you to make a small payment of €10k for insurance purposes.
This guy seems like a narcissist. “I haven’t been in the news in a months because of trump, let me do somthing news worthy”
Edit. He’s donating to his own foundation you doughnuts
This take would make more sense if it wasn’t something he does every year.
“donating 1.1 billion to his family’s foundation” he’s literally doing this to avoid paying taxes
You absolute fool
Except this is a good thing, and will encourage others.
