The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [498]
All involved had ample reason to behave well. Even though Buffett was giving away a vast sum, the money would be paid out over some years. And the stock he had not yet earmarked as a gift was estimated as worth more than $6 billion at the time. He still had plenty to give away.
The effects of Buffett’s announcement were immediate and sizable. Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong actor, announced that he would give away half his wealth. Li Ka-shing, Asia’s richest man, pledged a third of his $19 billion to his own charitable foundation. Carlos Slim, the Mexican communications monopolist, ridiculed Buffett and Gates for their philanthropy but, some months later, did a turnabout and announced that he, too, would begin giving money away. And the Gateses set up a new division within their foundation simply to handle people who wanted to make donations to them—such as a seven-year-old girl who sent the Gates Foundation her life savings of $35.
The newly enriched Gates Foundation was having a tectonic impact on the philanthropic world. Its “all-asset approach,” which greatly resembled Buffett’s ideas about concentration—and, indeed, his investing style—focused resources toward a short, carefully selected list of serious problems. That differed markedly from many other major foundations and community funds, at which a headquarters staff of philanthropoids circled around a series of supplicants, playing “eeny, meeny, miney, moe” as they doled out fragmentary sums. By the end of 2006, certain organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation had begun modifying their policies to align them more closely with the Gates approach.20
Three thousand letters from needy people poured into Buffett’s office after the Gates announcement, with more coming every day. They had no insurance and were overwhelmed by medical bills, or they had gotten injured on the job and their homes were being repossessed. Their children had cataclysmic health problems that required special care, which prevented them from making enough money to pay their mortgage. Or their boyfriends had gotten them pregnant, cheated them out of money, tricked them into assuming the boyfriend’s debt, and then run off without paying child support. They were the losers in the Ovarian Lottery. Warren forwarded the letters to his sister Doris. Over the past ten years her Sunshine Lady Foundation, funded with the proceeds from Howard Buffett’s trust, had helped thousands of victims of domestic violence, the severely disadvantaged, and families in crisis. He enclosed $5 million with the letters to help fund Doris’s work.
She hired a group of women over age fifty to help sort out the letters where “bad luck rather than bad choices” had played a part, and relatively small amounts of money could give someone a hand up. They often gave advice to the gamblers and credit-card addicts and people who just didn’t want to work, but they never bailed out people who had other ways to solve their problems. And Doris never paid for everything. “I don’t want to be their mommy,” she said. She also made them write thank-you letters. Her type of philanthropy taught gratitude and self-respect.21
Buffett kept handing out more of his billions. He was already giving $5 million a year to Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which he considered the most important of the U.S. organizations focused on dealing with the world’s nuclear threat, and he was willing to give more. Former Senator Sam Nunn, who ran NTI, had proposed a nuclear-fuel reserve to which countries could turn rather than developing their own nuclear enrichment programs, thereby reducing the likelihood of nuclear