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Written by Jonathan Stemple
(Reuters) – Warren Buffett donated another $5.3 billion in Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:) stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, his largest annual donation since he began making in 2006.
Buffett’s donation boosted his total giving to charities to about $57 billion, including family charities last November.
The latest donation, announced Friday, included about 13 million shares of Berkshire’s Class B stock.
Buffett donated 9.93 million shares to the Gates Foundation, giving away more than $43 billion of Berkshire stock there overall.
He also donated 993,035 shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after his late first wife, and 695,122 shares to each of the three charities led by his children Howard, Susan, and Peter: the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, and the Novo Foundation.
Buffett (93 years old) plans to donate more than 99% of the wealth he built in Berkshire, which is based in Omaha, Nebraska, and which he has managed since 1965, with his children appointed as executors of his will.
Berkshire Hathaway is a conglomerate worth about $880 billion that owns dozens of companies including railway company BNSF and auto insurance company Geico, as well as stocks such as Apple (NASDAQ:).
Buffett still owns 14.5% of Berkshire’s outstanding shares, a regulatory filing showed Friday, even though he has given away more than half of his shares since 2006.
His $128.4 billion fortune makes him the 10th richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
Buffett said in a statement that he was worth about $44 billion when the donations began, but the compounding benefits of Berkshire’s “simple, generally sound capital deployment” and “favorable American winds” produced his current wealth.
Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French-Gates were also pioneers of the Giving Pledge initiative, in which 245 people such as Sam Altman, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Mark Zuckerberg pledged at least half of their wealth to charity.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation works on reproductive health. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation works to alleviate hunger, reduce conflict, including in Ukraine, and improve public safety. The Sherwood Foundation supports nonprofits in Nebraska, and the NoVo Foundation has initiatives focused on girls and women.
The filings filed Friday indicate that, based on Buffett’s holdings, Berkshire has repurchased little or no of its stock since April 19.
