After Gates Is Cut Off, Buffett Family Foundations Move to Center Stage

In an interview on CNBC this morning, Warren Buffett said that he will no longer give money to the Gates Foundation. Instead, nearly all of his vast fortune, estimated to be more than $147 billion, will be given to his family’s foundations. Buffett has pledged to give away 99 percent of his wealth.

“I re-evaluated my whole situation,” Buffett said.

Philanthropy watchers have speculated for weeks about how Buffett will change his giving. In 2024, he first changed course saying that no money would go to the Gates Foundation after his death. This year he failed to make his usual late June disbursement to the foundation. Bill Gates’s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have been driving some of Buffett’s concerns about continued giving to the foundation.

Now Buffett is reverting to his original philanthropic vision from more than two decades ago. It’s a change that will cost the Gates Foundation many billions of dollars. 

Until his first wife died in 2004, Warren Buffett planned to leave his vast fortune to what’s now the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation. But her untimely passing due to a stroke — coupled with his growing admiration for the young foundation started by his friend Bill Gates — led to his extraordinary pledge in 2006 to eventually transfer the vast majority of his wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buffett’s two decades of giving to the foundation, via annual gifts, totaled more than $47 billion. Based on the 2006 agreement, Buffett was expected to donate almost $4.5 billion to the Gates Foundation this month.

Now he is back to plan A. 

Buffett talked about that original vision for how he and his wife Susan would carry out their giving in the CNBC interview. “My idea and conviction was that I would compound money at a better rate than society generally and that Susie would give it away better than 99.9 percent of the people that were giving it away, and she would get involved personally with the gifts,” he said. 

Fissures in the relationship with Gates appeared years ago, first due to what Buffett viewed as excessive spending on consultants at the Gates Foundation and more recently due to concerns about Bill Gates’s ties to Epstein. On Tuesday, Buffett announced that all of his giving this year would go to four foundations associated with his own family, with the largest sum — $4.4 billion — going to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.

Last year the Gates Foundation announced it would spend $200 billion over the next two decades and then shutter in 2045. In January, it announced that it would cut 500 of its 2,375 staff positions by 2030. 

Buffett Family Foundations Win Big, Will Face More Scrutiny

The focus areas of the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation include reproductive health, human rights, and education. Its $4.4 billion windfall is an unprecedented increase. The most the foundation received in one year previously was $1.2 billion, and most years it received less than $500 million. It has made large gifts to health ministries in Africa in recent years, including $150 million to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Nigeria, and has been a long-time supporter of the National Abortion Federation, which runs the national abortion hotline, granting it $182.7 million from 2023 to 2025, according to its informational tax returns.

The foundation has been run quietly for nearly 40 years by Allen Greenberg, who was married to Buffett’s daughter, Susie, at the time he was hired; the couple divorced more than three decades ago. Susie, her daughter Emily Greenberg, and Buffett’s son Peter are the foundation’s only trustees.

The three other foundations that are run by his children received smaller gifts of about $500 million each — roughly the same amount they received from Buffett in two gifts a year ago. Susie Buffett’s Sherwood Foundation focuses on Nebraska charities, including human-service groups in Omaha. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation describes its focus as food security, conflict mitigation, and countering human trafficking. Recent grant making at the Novo Foundation, the philanthropy of Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, has included support for child development, food systems, and charities in Kingston, N.Y. 

Buffett said that he trusts his children to give away his fortune. In fact, he indicated that he has never looked over their shoulders when it comes to their philanthropic work. “I told the three children that it is theirs and it’s their responsibility to get it done well,” he said in the CNBC interview. “I’ve never looked at their [IRS] Form 990s,” he added. “I’m not judging each action as it takes place.”

Over time, said John Longo, professor of finance and economics at Rutgers Business School, Buffett probably gained confidence in the work his family’s philanthropies were doing and felt secure giving the remainder of his fortune to them.

But Tuesday’s announcement is likely to increase scrutiny of the four foundations, which have for years quietly carried out grant making with the same light staffing philosophy that Warren Buffett prefers at Berkshire Hathaway.

The number of employees at the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation doubled from 2023 to 2025, according to informational tax returns, but it remains far leaner than the Gates Foundation’s staff. Its 102 employees distributed $1.4 billion in 2025. The Gates Foundation, with more than 2,200 employees, distributed $8.5 billion.

Timothy Ogden, managing director of the Financial Access Initiative at New York University, has doubts about the effectiveness of the four Buffett organizations. He worries that Buffett allowed his moral qualms with Gates to override a more important question -— how to most effectively distribute a fortune worth more than $140 billion.

“If it’s not Gates, how in fact is the money going to be given away?” said Ogden, whose initiative was started with a grant from the Gates Foundation. “And is it going to be given as well as it would have been? That remains the dominant question — not that Gates was perfect at giving away money, but they were competent. I think the general agreement is that they were well above average in global philanthropy. So what happens now?”

The Sherwood, Howard G. Buffett, Novo, and Susan Thompson Buffett foundations did not respond to emails and phone calls. An email to Buffett’s assistant at Berkshire was not returned.

In response to queries from the Chronicle, the Gates Foundation said in a statement that it was grateful to Buffett for his gifts, which helped the foundation improve health and opportunity for people around the world. “The foundation continues from a position of financial strength to advance our work through 2045, supported by Bill’s $200 billion commitment,” it wrote.

Buffett’s Philanthropic Future Is Unclear

While Buffett was clear about where he is giving his wealth, he was less clear about when it would be spent. When he gave to the Gates Foundation, it was with the stipulation that the funds be spent within a year of when they were received, which caused the foundation to ramp up its operations and super-charge its work. And in his Giving Pledge letter, from 2010, Buffett said he wanted his philanthropic fortune expended within 10 years after his estate settled, with no money left in an endowment. But Tuesday’s language was murkier, with Buffett stating he hoped his children could “carry out the disposal of my shares” by the end of 2034.

The latest statement left an unclear timeline for when the funds would actually get to charities and left open the possibility that they could be locked up in a foundation endowment.

“I’m concerned about how much of this money will actually get spent,” said Ray Madoff, co-founder and director of the Boston College Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good.

And these family foundations are very different from the Gates Foundation, which has a staff of thousands and a public relations department and gives public tours of its Discovery Center, which features exhibits about its philanthropic initiatives. In contrast, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is cryptic — its website functions as a link to a scholarship program, which accounts for little of its grant making. “The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation responds to questions about college scholarships only,” the site states. 

The Perils of Personal Philanthropy

Both Buffett and Gates are deeply tied to their philanthropy as larger-than-life business figures and two of the biggest philanthropists of the modern era. Gates, along with his former wife, Melinda French Gates, were both deeply involved in the work of the foundation. Buffett’s decision in 2006 to devote most of his wealth to a mega-foundation already created by one of his billionaire peers was “groundbreaking,” said Leslie Pine, managing partner of the Philanthropic Initiative, a philanthropy consulting firm. And it tied him personally to the foundation and to Bill.

“Philanthropy is such a personal thing,” she said. “Uber high net-worth individuals often really want to create their own foundation or their own vehicle for their philanthropy. “

The only real parallel, Pine said, is a major donor making a huge gift to a single institution like a university. When an outsize gift is made to one place, Pine said, it’s often because donors don’t want to go through the intense work of starting a foundation and have developed a long, trusting relationship with the beneficiary.

But sometimes after a major gift — or a collaboration with another donor — trust begins to break down.

“Once there is a rift in a relationship,” Pine said, “there’s not necessarily a clear-cut pathway forward.”

In June, Gates testified about his relationship with Epstein in a closed-door hearing of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee. According to the hearing transcript, Gates denied any wrongdoing but said that he regretted not factoring Epstein’s convictions “to a greater degree” before deciding to pursue philanthropic work with the disgraced financier. Gates admitted to having three affairs during his marriage but maintained the relationships were separate from his dealings with Epstein.

Buffett has been distancing himself from Gates since his Epstein ties became public. In his CNBC interview, Buffett said that he read the transcript of the hearing and called Gate’s behavior “distasteful” and said he made mistakes, but he chalked up much of Gates’s involvement with Epstein to poor judgment. Buffett said that he, too, had made mistakes in judging people. “I made mistakes and hired all kinds of people, or choosing friends and then finding out whether or not they, one way or another, weren’t what I thought they were.”  

He said that he met with Gates about three weeks ago for about three hours and informed him then that he was cutting off the foundation. But he also remarked on the long friendship between the two. 

“It’s been a wonderful friendship,” Buffett said. “Bill and I are interested in enough things that overlap that we find plenty to talk about.”

In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, Gates lauded Buffett as “one of the greatest philanthropists of all time.” He reiterated his previous commitment to give “virtually” all of his wealth to the foundation over the next 20 years and credited Buffett with helping save millions of lives.

“My gratitude to Warren is immeasurable, and I cherish the time we spend together. I hope we have much more of it ahead.”

Critics of Gates see his choices differently and would like to see the foundation take stronger action against the billionaire.

“Bill Gates’s reckless leadership is unquestionably a huge liability —- that can now be measured in the billions of dollars the foundation is losing,” Tim Schwab, a journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, said in an email. “The board’s ongoing inability to remove him shows how deep the crisis of governance is at the world’s most powerful foundation.”

Update (July 15 at 2:47 p.m.): This article has been updated with a statement from Bill Gates.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified Leslie Pine’s organization. She is managing partner of the Philanthropic Initiative, not the Philanthropy Initiative.