What Happens To Warren Buffett's Money When He Dies?

Warren Buffett's first job paid less than a car payment, yet the Bloomberg Billionaires Index now shows his net worth is $144 billion, and he plans to give almost all of it away. In a shareholder letter in November 2024, he repeated his goal to donate 99.5% of his wealth, Reuters reported. That matches the commitment he made in 2010 when he co-founded the Giving Pledge with Bill and Melinda Gates. Billionaires who signed the pledge promised to give at least half of their money to charity.

Buffett went further, saying that more than 99% of his fortune will go to philanthropy instead of to his three children as an inheritance. He already follows through on the pledge by regularly giving away stock in his company Berkshire Hathaway. In June 2025, for example, he converted 8,239 Class A Berkshire Hathaway shares into more than 12.3 million Class B shares and donated them to five foundations. At $6 billion, it was his largest single-year gift to date, cementing him as a financial "celebrity" real experts respect.

Nearly 10 million shares went to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, with the rest split between the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the three charities led by his children. Reuters says these donations brought his lifetime giving to those charities to over $60 billion, but Berkshire stock keeps rising, and his remaining shares are still large enough to fund future gifts. Buffett's will says the rest of his wealth will fund a charitable trust managed by his children after his death. They will have 10 years to disburse the money.

Warren Buffett first outlined his plans to contribute to his children's charitable legacies in 2006, when he pledged to donate annually to each of the three family foundations led by Susan, Howard, and Peter Buffett. Six years later, in a birthday letter, he doubled the remainder of his original pledge for a total of more than 24 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares for each foundation, leaving them each with about $2.1 billion in stock over time. These gifts are for philanthropy, not personal spending, and he asked that future grants reflect their decisions, not his.

Buffett believes one should "leave the children enough so that they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing," a sentiment he has repeated over the years. He feels that large personal inheritances can lead to family tension and reduce individual motivation. This may be the reason Buffett quit giving his family cash for Christmas and switched to company shares.

The promised stock arrives in yearly batches to the charities and is supplemented by additional grants. Each new round brings the donations closer to the goal of about 24 million shares and, as Berkshire's stock rises, the foundation's endowments can likely continue to grow even after making charitable disbursements. Much of Buffett's contributions have also been to the Gates foundation, but he says those donations will stop upon his death.