It’s been an eventful few weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove to be the most important revelations of 2024 have largely flown under the radar.
That’s what 93-year-old Warren Buffett said, whose fortune is estimated $137 billion making him the fifth richest person In the United States, there will be Don’t pay anymore At his death his fortune bequeathed to the Gates Foundation, as had long been planned. Instead, it will go into a trust where his three grown children will decide what to do with it.
“The Gates Foundation has no money after I die,” Buffett said The Wall Street Journal. “I feel very, very good about the values of my three children and I have 100 percent faith in how they will handle things.”
Philanthropic trusts Buffett wants to set up quickly Became the largest charitable foundation in the world, endowed with the kind of funds that could conceivably save millions of lives. But in reality, it seems unlikely to actually help the world.
Why is this? Buffett said there would have to be a unanimous agreement among his three children to spend the money he is leaving behind. A problem there is that they all have very different interests.
Susie Buffett has an existing foundation that strives to bring Social Justice in Nebraska, where both he and Warren Buffett live Howard Buffett, who served as an Illinois county sheriff, did He faced criticism for his private volunteer border control efforts in Arizona. Peter Buffett, who is based in Kingston, New York, There is a foundation that “support initiatives that promote a holistic, interconnected and healing vision for humanity.”
These are three very different visions of how to change the world, and as people have been quick to observe, the words “three madmen have to agree on how to spend $135 billion” More like the premise for a sitcom A process that would be done real well with a lot of money.
(posthumous) suit to give effectually
Does Warren Buffett owe it to the world to give away his fortune? I would argue that yes, he does.
With $137 billion comes tremendous responsibility. If Buffett thinks so, he is indicatedHe has the Gates Foundation More than $40 billion has already been disbursed Going the wrong way, he can do something completely different. But he should aspire to do better.
And it doesn’t get any better than the Gates Foundation.
Among other achievements, the Gates Foundation launched Gavi, a non-profit to provide vaccines to poor countries. Gavi has vaccinated more than 1 billion children and is estimated to have preserved its function 17 million lives.
The Gates Foundation also led the creation of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and funded basic research and engineering aimed at making essential medical care cheaper and easier.
The premise, to be sure, is far from perfect. As my colleague Dylan Matthews has written , its well-intentioned work on US education policy has seen far less spectacular returns, and it has recently disappointed many of its partners. Procedures for malaria vaccine rollout. But perfection can be too much to expect.
You might expect doing good with billions of dollars to be easy, but it actually seems a lot harder — harder, perhaps, than doing good with less.
Many well-intentioned charitable efforts fail or even backfire. Many great programs cannot absorb billions of dollars in funding, and scaling existing programs is usually challenging. Giving grants requires either a lot of work or admitting that you sometimes do cheat.
But some people wander at the other end of the spectrum and act as if a charity doesn’t really do any good. That is just false.
Millions of people are alive today because of the charitable work of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Their lives matter as much as yours or mine. There are inventions and discoveries that Gates Foundation grants, often funded by Buffett’s money, have made possible and are now delivering drugs that will save and improve more lives.
The difference between $137 billion spent on vaccinations and basic research for the world’s deadliest diseases, versus spending it on nothing particularly important, can be measured in millions of lives. This may be the most influential of the news stories of the past few weeks; Few US presidents make decisions that save or kill millions of children.
With great fortune comes great responsibility
There’s something that feels a little uncomfortable about saying “this decision will kill millions of children,” even though it’s probably true. It feels unfair to Buffett to rate him more harshly than Elon Musk, who is spending his Billions to buy Twitter, or Jeff Bezos, who is still early in his philanthropic career, because Buffett has such a strong past record as an effective philanthropist. And it’s important to note that Buffett announced his new plan alongside an additional $5 billion gift to the Gates Foundation — money that will save many lives I want to do something more subtle here than condemning him.
My impression from years of reading Buffett’s own writings is that Buffett is a fundamentally admirable and generous person. He is a man who Refused to join a country club For it would not pass among the Jews, and those who still alive The Omaha home he bought in 1958. He has consistently advocated for society to help the less fortunate. This sense of obligation has led him to do incredible, valuable, life-saving things with his money.
I believe he doesn’t want people to die and wants to use his destiny to fix the world. My sense is that he had a gradual breakup with the Gates Foundation – when he started Exit their board Immediately after Bill Gates’ divorce – has been complicated and certainly painful, and he no longer believes that this is the best way to pay his bills. I don’t have all the context there, and it seems entirely possible to me that if I did, I’d think he was right.
But still, I think it would be a tragedy for his final act to have the world’s greatest fortune locked up in a foundation for his old children. If he no longer believes that the Gates Foundation is the right place to do well with it, I hope he will consider it It is given directly to the world’s poorest peopleOr charge his new base with dealing with the world The biggest remaining killer diseaseOr announcing an award of money for the company developing the best tuberculosis vaccine.
And I hope that his children, whose philanthropy thus far has focused mostly on exploring queer perspectives in different parts of small-town America, remember that their father made his fortune by buying at a discount — and Quality-adjusted life years Buy abroad at maximum discount.
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