Warren Buffett has now given away over $50 billion to charities since 2006. That’s more than his net worth when he first started to give away his fortune.
The latest gifts were split among five charities, as Buffett converted a little more than 9,000 of his Class A shares in Berkshire Hathaway to 13.7 million Class B shares. Recipients included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and three organizations run by his children.
After these most recent donations, Buffett still holds 218,287 Class A shares, which are worth more than $111 billion. Each share, as of Friday morning, was trading at roughly $510,000.
“When [the lifetime commitments to the five foundations were] originally made, I owned 474,998 Berkshire A shares worth about $43 billion, and those shares represented more than 98% of my net worth,” Buffett wrote in a statement. “During the following 17 years, I have neither bought nor sold any A or B shares. Nor do I intend to do so. The five foundations have received Berkshire B shares that had a value when received of about $50 billion, substantially more than my entire net worth in 2006. I have no debts, and my remaining A shares are worth…well over 99% of my net worth.”
Buffett plans to give away all of his Berkshire shares through annual gifts. In 1986, he famously told Fortune that his three children would receive “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”
The current schedule, he has said, will be completed 10 years after his estate is settled. He’s currently ranked as the world’s seventh richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, after his charitable gift moved Steve Ballmer into the No. 6 spot.
