Warren Buffett donates $5.3B, rewrites his will

Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway attends the annual Berkshire shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, May 3, 2019. (AFP / Johannes EISELE)

ALBAWABA - Billionaire Warren Buffett, who will turn 94 in August, donated $5.3 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stocks to five charitable organizations on Friday, according to CNBC, marking his largest yearly contribution to date.

According to a statement made on Friday, the prominent investor converted 8,674 Berkshire Class A shares, resulting in a contribution of nearly 13 million Class B shares. Of these, 9.93 million shares went to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, while the remaining shares were split between his three children's charities, Howard, Susan, and Peter Buffett, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which bears the name of his late first wife.

The Berkshire Hathaway chairman revealed to the Wall Street Journal that he has revised his will once again and that, upon his passing, he intends to place his enormous fortune in a new charity trust that will be managed by his three children rather than continuing to donate to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Buffett explained to the Journal that he has revised his will on multiple occasions, creating the most recent version considering that he believes his kids would uphold his beliefs and manage his riches, saying “I feel very, very good about the values of my three children, and I have 100% trust in how they will carry things out.”

“It should be used to help the people that haven’t been as lucky as we have been,” Buffet said, adding that “there’s eight billion people in the world, and me and my kids, we’ve been in the luckiest 100th of 1% or something. There’s lots of ways to help people.”

Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info).