Buffett ends Gates Foundation donations, gives $6 billion to family charities

Warren Buffett cut the Gates Foundation out of his annual Berkshire Hathaway donation for the first time since 2006, sending about 12 million Class B shares worth roughly $6 billion to four family foundations instead. The 95-year-old Omaha investor said he wants to finish giving away his remaining Berkshire stock by December 31, 2034, sharpening a long-planned succession of wealth into charities controlled by his children.

Berkshire said the shares will be divided among the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. CNBC said 9 million shares will go to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, with 1 million shares each going to the other three. The Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, was left out of the midyear gift for the first time in 20 years.

That omission ends one of the most visible donor relationships in modern philanthropy. Berkshire’s June 26, 2006 letter said Buffett was “irrevocably committing” annual Berkshire gifts for the benefit of the Gates Foundation, and the foundation says Buffett has given it $47.9 billion through 2025. Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates together had given the foundation $63.9 billion through 2025, making Buffett’s money only part of a much larger endowment base.

The break lands while Bill Gates is still dealing with the reputational fallout from his past interactions with Jeffrey Epstein. Gates testified in a closed-door House Oversight Committee interview on June 10, 2026, and later said in prepared remarks that he had never witnessed or had indication Epstein was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct. Gates has not been accused of crimes, but the episode has kept attention on the ties between elite donor networks and the figures around them.

The Gates Foundation says it will spend $200 billion over the next 20 years and close on December 31, 2045. Its 2024 annual report says it provided $8.015 billion in total charitable support that year, underscoring how much of its work rests on its own resources as much as any single benefactor. Buffett’s exit from the foundation does not threaten its finances, but it does expose how quickly a decades-long philanthropic alliance can be rewritten when personal trust and public scrutiny collide.