“93-year-old Warren Buffett, whose estimated fortune of $137 billionmakes 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.”
…
“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.”
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/363170/warren-buffett-bill-gates-foundation-billion-charity