Warren Buffett’s net worth won’t go to Gates Foundation charity

So much has happened in these last few weeks that what I think will ultimately prove to be one of the most important discoveries of 2024 has gone largely unnoticed.

This is the news revealed by 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated wealth is $137 billion Making him the fifth richest person In the United States, No longer give His plan was to leave his fortune to the Gates Foundation when he died, but instead it will go to a trust where his three adult children will decide what to do with it.

“The Gates Foundation will not receive any funds after my death,” Buffett told the Gates Foundation. The Wall Street Journal. “I feel very, very good about the values ​​of my three kids, and I trust 100 percent in how they’re going to do it.”

Buffett’s planned charitable trust will soon be Become the world’s largest charitable foundationmoney that could potentially save millions of lives. But in reality, it seems unlikely to actually help the world.

Why? Buffett once said that to spend the money he left behind, he had to get the unanimous consent of his three children. But the problem is that they have different interests and hobbies.

Suzy Buffett has a foundation dedicated to Social Justice in NebraskaShe and Warren Buffett both lived there. Howard Buffett was a county sheriff in Illinois. Criticized for its private volunteer border control work in ArizonaPeter Buffett currently lives in Kingston, New York. Have a foundation “Support initiatives that promote a whole, connected, and healing vision of humanity.”

These were three very different visions of how to change the world, and as one person was quick to observe, “three weirdos having to agree on how to spend $135 billion” sounded like More like a sitcom premise Rather than using so much money to achieve real benefits.

Should Warren Buffett give his fortune away to the world, let alone do good to it? I think he should.

$137 billion brings extraordinary responsibility. If Buffett believes that It has been shownthe Gates Foundation to which he donated More than $40 billion donated He could definitely do something different if he went in the wrong direction. But he should aspire to do something better than this.

But it’s not easy to do better than the Gates Foundation.

Other achievements of the Gates Foundation include the creation of Gavi, a nonprofit that provides vaccines to poor countries. Gavi has vaccinated more than 1 billion children and estimates that its work has saved 17 million lives.

The Gates Foundation also took the lead in creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and supports basic research and engineering aimed at reducing the cost of necessary health care and making it more accessible.

Of course, the foundation is far from perfect. As my colleague Dylan Matthews has written, its well-intentioned work on American education policy has The rewards are not so greatand recently many of its partners have also been disappointed with it Ways to promote malaria vaccines. But expectations of perfection may be too high.

You might think it’s easy to do good with billions of dollars, but it’s actually much harder than it looks—perhaps even harder than doing good with less money.

Many good charitable activities Failure or even counterproductive. Many great projects cannot absorb billions of dollars in funding, and scaling up existing projects is often challenging. Grants either require extensive due diligence or accept that Being cheated.

But some people do the exact opposite and act as if philanthropy has no benefits at all. This is completely wrong.

Millions of people are alive today because of the philanthropy of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Their lives are as important as yours and mine. Inventions and discoveries funded by the Gates Foundation (often paid for with Buffett’s money) have come to fruition, and drugs are being distributed now that will save and improve even more lives.

The difference between $137 billion spent on vaccinations and basic research against the world’s deadliest diseases and $137 billion spent on things that don’t matter can be measured in millions of lives. This may be the most impactful piece of news in the past few weeks; few American presidents would make such a decision. Save or kill millions of children.

It feels a little uncomfortable to say “this decision will lead to the death of millions of children,” even though it may be true. It feels unfair to judge Buffett more harshly than Elon Musk, who is spending money lavishly. his Billions of dollars to buy Twitter, or Jeff Bezos Still early Buffett has been very successful with his philanthropy throughout his career, as he has been a very effective philanthropist in the past. It is worth noting that Buffett announced his new plan at the same time as he donated $5 billion to the Gates Foundation – money that will save A lot of lives. I wanted to do something more subtle than condemn him.

Over the years, I have read Buffett’s own writings and have come to feel that he is a fundamentally admirable and generous person. Refuse to join the country club Because it didn’t let the Jews in, and Still alive In 1958, he purchased a house in Omaha. He has always been an advocate for the community to help the less fortunate. This sense of responsibility has led him to do incredible, worthwhile, life-saving things with his money.

I believe he doesn’t want people to die, and he wants to use his wealth to fix the world. My sense is that his gradual break with the Gates Foundation — which began when he Leaving the Board Shortly after Bill Gates’ divorce, his financial situation became complicated and certainly painful, and he no longer thought this was the best way to give away his money. I don’t know all the background, but if I did, I would have thought he was right.

But even so, I think it would be tragic if his final act was to lock up one of the world’s largest fortunes in a foundation for his aging children to quarrel over. If he no longer believes the Gates Foundation is the right place to do good, I hope he’ll consider Directly to the world’s poorest peopleOr let his new foundation be responsible for solving the world’s The biggest deadly disease in existenceOr award the money to the company that develops the best tuberculosis vaccine.

I hope his children will remember that their father made his fortune by buying at a discount—and that their philanthropy has so far focused on pursuing eccentric visions in various parts of small-town America—and Quality-Adjusted Life Years Enjoy the biggest discounts when buying overseas.

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