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By Root 3121 0

thoughts had begun to crystallize. While he was pleased with the job his kids were doing with their own foundations, the sense of safety and security that Big Susie had given him was not duplicable. This emotional force operated beyond a conscious level. His decision to leave her in charge of the money had never been based on a rational or calculated assessment of her qualifications as a philanthropist. With the accretion of a decades-long relationship, he had simply built up layers of personal trust and comfort in his wife’s judgment and wisdom. Now that she was gone, everything was different. He mentioned his change of heart to Tom Murphy at Murphy’s daughter’s wedding. Out of the blue, he told Sharon Osberg. He was going to give the money away early. But he had only an idea, not a plan.

The plan, which was complicated, took months to work out in detail. The following spring, he started telling the people who were directly affected. “Brace yourself,” he said when he sat down with Carol Loomis, one of the Buffett Foundation trustees. “The news was indeed stunning,” she wrote.12

“I got lots of questions,” he said about the conversations in which he made this startling announcement, “and some people had qualms about the plan initially because it was such an abrupt change from what they had been anticipating.”13 His sisters, on the other hand, were instantly enthusiastic when they found out. “This is the best idea you’ve had,” wrote Bertie afterward, “since you pretended to have asthma to get sent home from Fredericksburg.”14 Doris—who knew from her Sunshine Lady Foundation how much work it was to give away even a few million dollars intelligently—thought it was a brilliant decision.15

On June 26, 2006, Buffett announced that he would give away eighty-five percent of his Berkshire Hathaway stock—worth $37 billion at the time—to a group of foundations over a number of years. No gift of this size had ever been made in the history of philanthropy. Five out of every six shares would go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, already the largest charity in the world, in a historic marriage of two fortunes for the betterment of the world.16 He was requiring that the money be spent as it was given, so that the foundations could not perpetuate themselves. To cushion the shock of losing the money that would someday have made their family foundation the largest in the world, Buffett divided the remaining shares, worth about $6 billion, among his children’s individual foundations, each of which would receive shares worth $1 billion, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which would receive shares worth $3 billion. None of the children had ever expected their personal foundations to reach such an enormous size, especially not while he was alive. At the date of the gift, the shares handed over in the first year’s installment were worth $1.5 billion to the Gates Foundation, $50 million to each of his children’s foundations, and $150 million to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. Depending on Berkshire’s stock price, those values could vary. As it turned out, they would increase. They would increase a lot.17

The man who was, at the time, the second richest person on earth was giving away his money without leaving a trace of himself behind. He had spent all his life rolling up the snowball as if it were an extension of himself; yet he would establish no Warren Buffett Foundation, no Buffett hospital wing, no college or university endowment or building with his name on it. To donate the money without naming something after himself, without controlling personally how it would be spent—to put the money in the coffers of another foundation that he had selected for its competence and efficiency, rather than creating a whole new empire—upended every convention of giving. No major donor had ever done such a thing before. “It was a historic moment in the field of philanthropy globally,” said Doug Bauer of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. “It’s set a bar, a touchstone, for others.”18

That Warren Buffett had done this was both surprising