Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 4 of a series)

Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 4 of a series)

By Tom Wilson Major Gifts Guru

This article is part of an ongoing series of excerpts and insights from the recent biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business Life by Alice Schroeder. I encourage you to read the entire book to hear the full story.

“In 1984, Warren Buffett was worth $8 billion. He and his wife Susie had already decided that they would donate most of their fortune to their charitable foundation making it one of Berkshire Hathaway’s largest shareholders. The foundation was giving about $3.5 million a year away at this stage.”

And yet, Buffett was thinking about philanthropy.

“. . . Buffett handed our copies of a booklet, The Gospel of Wealth by turn-of-the-century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. As he celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday, and took stock of his life to date, he had been rereading Carnegie. Now he led the group in a debate of Carnegie’s premise that ‘He who dies rich dies disgraced.’

“Carnegie had honored that philosophy, spending nearly his whole fortune, one of the greatest in history at the time, to establish libraries in towns and cities all over the United States. Buffett had always planned to die rich and disgraced, as Carnegie would put it, so that there would be more to give away after he was gone. He insisted that the best use of his talents was to keep making more money until he died, and he had to interest in being personally involved in the foundation’s work. That would be Susie’s project. But he wanted to hear what other people thought and obviously was giving some consideration to this question.

“They went around the table. Bill Ruane, who had never cared much about money and was poor compared to the rest, was about to undertake a project to transform the worst of New York’s public schools. He would later go to work with Columbia University to screen thousands of New York City schoolchildren for mood disorders and suicide risk.

“Fred and Alice Stanback were among the most important donors to environmental causes in the United States. Tom Murphy was chairman of Save the Children. Jane Olson, Ron’s wife, chaired the international board of Human Rights Watch. Before Dan’s death, the Cowins had donated an important collection of art to the American Folk Art Museum. Charlie Munger gave to Good Samaritan Hospital and education. Walter and Suzanne Scott had donated huge amounts of money in Omaha. Ruth Gottesman served on the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Board of Oversees. Marshall Weinberg was gradually giving away nearly all of his money for scholarships, world health, Middle East issues, and educational research. The others had their own causes.

“When his turn in the conversation came, Bill Gates said, shouldn’t the measure of accomplishment be how many lives you can save with a given amount of money? He agreed with Buffett that you had to make the money first in order to have the money to give away. But as soon as you made a certain amount, Gates said, he was going to use it to save more lives in the present, by giving most of it away.

“The Buffett Foundation was spending very little in proportion to Buffett’s wealth.”

More to come (These philanthropy excerpts are like gold from this book).

This article is part of series. To read the other articles in the series, please click the links below:

Permanent Link: Mega Donor Values Warren Buffett (Part 4 of a series)

http://majorgiftsguru.com/2009/07/mega-donor-values-warren-buffett-part-4.html

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