Buffett donates $1.14 billion in Berkshire shares to charities

Warren Buffett has a net worth of $150.2 billion, making him the seventh-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Warren Buffett is donating roughly $1.14 billion of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shares to four family foundations as part of a charitable pledge the billionaire made nearly two decades ago.

The 94-year-old investor will convert 1,600 of Berkshire’s Class A shares into 2.4 million Class B shares, the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate said in a statement Monday. He’ll then give 1.5 million of those shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his late wife, and 300,000 to each of his children’s foundations, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation.

In 2010, Buffett started the Giving Pledge with his friends Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, saying he would donate his fortune either in his lifetime or at his death. Four years earlier, he had started making massive donations to the Gates’s foundation, as well as foundations tied to his children.

In June, Buffett announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation won’t receive any more donations after his death, with his daughter and two sons overseeing a new charitable trust. At the time, he pledged 13 million Berkshire Class B shares to the four family foundations, and the Gates Foundation.

“Susie and I had long encouraged our children in small philanthropic activities and had been pleased with their enthusiasm, diligence and results,” Buffett said in a letter to shareholders Monday. “At her death, however, they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated. Nevertheless, their philanthropic activities were dramatically increased by the 2006 lifetime pledge that I subsequently made and later expanded.”

The donations reduce Buffett’s holdings in Berkshire Class A shares to 206,363, down almost 57% since the 2006 pledge, he said in the letter. He has a net worth of $150.2 billion, making him the seventh-richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.