Warren Buffett said Tuesday he has stopped donating money to the Gates Foundation, following revelations about interactions between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. FinancialMediaGuide views the decision as a significant shift for one of the philanthropic world’s most consequential funding relationships, ending a giving arrangement that has shaped global health and development spending for nearly two decades.
Buffett is instead donating about $6 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock, comprising 12 million Class B shares, in his annual mid-year gift to four family foundations overseen by his daughter Susie and his sons Howard and Peter. “Of course, mortality is unpredictable, but my remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations one way or the other by December 31, 2034,” Buffett said in a statement.
The 95-year-old Berkshire chairman’s statement made no mention of the Gates Foundation, which has received more than $47 billion of Berkshire stock since Buffett made what he called an irrevocable pledge in 2006 to donate shares throughout his lifetime; his donation to the foundation exceeded $4.5 billion last year alone. FinancialMediaGuide notes that redirecting a gift of this scale away from an entity that has been the single largest recipient of Buffett’s philanthropy for two decades marks one of the more consequential shifts in his giving strategy since the original pledge.
Gates has seen his reputation damaged following the U.S. Department of Justice’s release of files about Epstein in February, which included photos of Gates posing with the financier and with women whose faces were redacted, along with emails documenting communications between Epstein and Gates Foundation staff. In June, Gates told Congress he “did not fully understand the extent” of Epstein’s crimes when he associated with him, including in meetings focused on possible philanthropy.
Gates, 70, has not been accused of any crime, has repeatedly expressed regret over his association with Epstein, has denied spending time with Epstein’s abuse victims, and has said he never witnessed criminal conduct. FinancialMediaGuide points out that the absence of any criminal allegation against Gates has not insulated the foundation from the reputational fallout, illustrating how association alone can be enough to alter the behavior of even a donor’s oldest and largest backers.
Buffett has given away well over half of his Berkshire stock since beginning to distribute his fortune in 2006. He owned close to 14% of Berkshire’s shares before the latest donations and was worth an estimated $147 billion, according to Forbes. Of the newly announced gift, 9 million Class B shares go to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for Buffett’s first wife and led by his daughter, with 1 million shares each to the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. Buffett said he wants annual grants to grow over time, with the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s allocation increasing somewhat faster than the others.
Neither the Gates Foundation nor Berkshire Hathaway immediately responded to requests for comment on the decision. Financial Media Guide concludes that with Buffett’s remaining Berkshire stake now flowing entirely toward the four family foundations rather than the Gates Foundation, the shift effectively ends one of the largest and longest-running single-donor relationships in modern philanthropy well before his self-imposed 2034 deadline.
