Buffett's Three Children to Direct Distribution of His Roughly $150 Billion Fortune, Admit They Have Not Yet Figured Out How
Warren Buffett's roughly $150 billion fortune will, after his death, be distributed under the unanimous direction of his three children, Susie, Howard and Peter Buffett, over a period of about 10 years, according to a Bloomberg feature published on October 18. Under the arrangement Buffett set out during his lifetime, the three must agree unanimously; none of them can decide the fortune's destination alone.
Each of the three currently runs a family foundation distributing about $500 million a year. After their father's death they will face an annual distribution scale of more than $15 billion, roughly ten times the current level. Susie Buffett told Bloomberg: "We don't know yet." The report said the three admit to being daunted by the scale of the task, while noting that years of running their foundations in fields such as education, agriculture and food security, and community development have given them experience in giving away large sums.
Buffett made an earlier round of arrangements for his holdings this year: in July he donated about $6 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares to four family foundations, about $4.5 billion of it to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and about $500 million each to the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. The Gates Foundation, the largest recipient of his giving since his 2006 pledge, was not on the list this time. Under his plan, his remaining shares are to be transferred to the four family foundations in full by December 31, 2034.
Buffett stepped down as Berkshire Hathaway's chief executive at the end of 2025 and was succeeded by Greg Abel, remaining as chairman. How the three children complete the distribution within about a decade will be one of the largest personal-estate dispersals in American philanthropic history. (GSM, based on Bloomberg reporting)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：沃伦·巴菲特（资料图，摄于2015年 SelectUSA 投资峰会）。美国国际贸易管理局摄，公共领域，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: Warren Buffett (file photo, 2015 SelectUSA Investment Summit). U.S. International Trade Administration, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
