Warren Buffett’s breakup with the Gates Foundation will hurt the world

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks, so much so that what I think will ultimately prove one of 2024’s most important revelations largely flew under the radar.

That is the revelation that 93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of $137 billion makes him the fifth-richest person in the US, will no longer give away his fortune on his death to the Gates Foundation, as had long been planned. Instead, it will go to a trust where his three adult children will decide what to do with it.

“The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death,” Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very, very good about the values of my three children, and I have 100 percent trust in how they will carry things out.”

The philanthropic trust Buffett intends to set up will rapidly become the world’s largest charitable foundation, endowed with the kind of funding that could conceivably save lives by the millions. But in reality, it seems very unlikely to actually help the world.

Why’s that? Buffett has said that to spend the money he’s leaving, there will have to be unanimous agreement among his three children. One issue there is that they all have very different interests.

Susie Buffett has an existing foundation that strives to bring about social justice in Nebraska, where both she and Warren Buffettt live. Howard Buffett, who has served as a county sheriff in Illinois, has attracted criticism for his private volunteer border control efforts in Arizona. Peter Buffett, who is based in Kingston, New York, has a foundation that “supports initiatives that promote a holistic, interconnected and healing vision for humanity.”

These are three very distinct visions of how to bring about change in the world, and as people quickly observed, “three eccentrics have to agree on how to spend $135 billion” sounds more like the premise for a sitcom than a process that will accomplish real good with that much money.

Does Warren Buffett owe it to the world to give away his fortune at all, let alone well? I’d argue that yes, he does.

With $137 billion comes extraordinary responsibility. If Buffett thinks, as he has been indicating, that the Gates Foundation to which he has already given over $40 billion is headed in the wrong direction, he can absolutely do something different. But he should be aspiring to do something better than this.

And doing better than the Gates Foundation isn’t easy.

Among other achievements, the Gates Foundation launched Gavi, a nonprofit for providing vaccines in poor countries. Gavi has vaccinated more than 1 billion children and estimates its work has saved 17 million lives.

The Gates Foundation was also a leader in creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and funded basic research and engineering aimed at making necessary medical care cheaper and easier to deliver.

The foundation, to be sure, is far from perfect. As my colleague Dylan Matthews has written, its well-intentioned work in US education policy has seen much less stellar returns, and it’s recently frustrated many of its partners with its approach to malaria vaccine rollouts. But perfection might be too much to expect.

You might expect it’d be easy to do good with billions of dollars, but it’s actually a lot harder than it looks — harder, perhaps, than doing good with less money.

Many well-intentioned charitable efforts fail or even backfire. Many great programs can’t absorb billions of dollars in funding, and scaling up existing programs is usually challenging. Giving out grants either requires lots of due diligence or accepting that you’ll sometimes be scammed.

But some people swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum and act like no charity really does any good. That’s simply false.

There are millions of people 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 paid for with Buffett money, have made possible, and medications being distributed right now that will save and improve more lives.

The difference between $137 billion being spent on vaccinations and fundamental research for the world’s deadliest diseases, versus it being spent on nothing important in particular, can be measured in millions of lives. It may well be the most impactful of the stories in the news the last few weeks; very few US presidents make decisions that save or kill millions of children.

There is something that feels a little uncomfortable about saying “this decision will lead to millions of children dying,” even when it’s probably true. It feels unfair to Buffett to evaluate him more harshly than, say, Elon Musk, who is spending his billions on purchasing Twitter, or Jeff Bezos, who is still early in his philanthropic career, just because Buffett has such a strong past record as an effective philanthropist. And it’s important to note that Buffett announced his new plans alongside a gift of an additional $5 billion to the Gates Foundation — money that will save a lot of lives. I want to do something more nuanced here than condemn him.

My sense from reading years of Buffett’s own writing is that Buffett is a fundamentally admirable and generous person. He’s a man who refused to join a country club because it wouldn’t let in Jews, and who still lives in 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, lifesaving things with his money.

I believe that he does not want people to die and wants to make use of his fortune to fix the world. My sense is that his gradual breakup with the Gates Foundation — beginning when he departed their board shortly after Bill Gates’s divorce — has been complicated and certainly painful, and that he no longer believes it’s the best way to give away his money. 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 even so, I think it would be a tragedy for his final act to be locking up one of the world’s largest fortunes in a foundation for his aging children to quibble over. If he no longer believes the Gates Foundation is the right place to do good with it, I wish he’d consider giving it directly to the world’s poorest people, or charging his new foundation with tackling the world’s biggest remaining killer diseases, or declaring the money a prize for the company that develops the best tuberculosis vaccine.

And I hope that his children, whose philanthropy so far has mostly focused on the pursuit of eccentric visions in different parts of small-town America, keep in mind that their father made his fortune by buying at a discount — and quality-adjusted life years are purchased at the greatest discount overseas.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!