Warren Buffett gave Berkshire Hathaway shares valued at about $4 billion to charities including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, part of the annual plan he started more than a decade ago.
The more than 14 million Berkshire Class B shares were donated to a total of five philanthropies, including ones run by his children, according to a statement Tuesday. His holdings in the conglomerate he built now consist of 229,016 Class A shares and 276 Class B shares.
Buffett, 91, built one of the world’s largest fortunes out of his Omaha, Nebraska-based company. He’s pledged to donate all of the Berkshire shares he owns to various philanthropies after his death, a plan he detailed in 2019’s annual letter to shareholders.
This donation will reduce Buffett’s fortune to $96.3 billion, enough to drop him one slot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the world’s richest people. He was ranked fifth before Tuesday’s transfer, just behind his friend and philanthropic partner, Bill Gates. The gift will drop him below $100 billion for the first time since September.
Buffett’s contribution to the Gates Foundation comes almost a year after he resigned from the trustee role at that organization. Other groups receiving donations were the charity named after his late wife, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, as well as ones led by his children: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.
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