From today's New York Times, a warm article about the children of Warren Buffett and what impact they might have on the world, given the billions of dollars they have received to run their various foundations ... from a very early age, don't we all imagine what we might do if we had $100, $100,000, $1,000,000? And just last week, the question was posed to me: What would you do if you had $31 billion -- THIRTY-ONE BILLION DOLLARS?
My goodness, what WOULD I do? The possibilities are endless, the money seems endless, yet when I sit down to make a list, my brain jams up. It's just too much ... yet for the Buffett family, it's not. Who knows what their personal lives are like. Who knows what their deepest motivations are. Who knows if they mean what they say. But my eyes see what they see and my ears hear what they hear. These people, and people like them (thank you, Bill and Melinda Gates) have the ability and the heart, apparently, to change the world. Would that we all did ...
By JEFF BAILEY
Published: July 2, 2006
DECATUR, Ill., June 28 — The three middle-aged children of Warren E. Buffett watched along with the rest of the country last week as their father, the celebrated investor from Omaha, told the world that he would pass the bulk of his $40 billion personal fortune to the charitable foundation of Bill Gates, a fellow billionaire, and his wife, Melinda.
But Susie, Howard and Peter Buffett — who, like their self-effacing father seem little affected by money — spent the week focusing not on what they might have received. Instead, the siblings said in interviews, they were already at work trying to figure out how to manage a gift from their father valued at about $1 billion each that will go to their own charitable foundations.
That will propel them, along with a fourth and larger foundation named for their late mother, into the top ranks of philanthropy — dwarfed, to be sure, by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the $60 billion or more endowment from the Gates and Buffett fortunes.
The younger Buffetts, given their current interests, could emerge as powerful forces in the areas of early childhood education, safe drinking water for poor countries and the well-being of Native Americans.
The foundation named for their mother — Warren Buffett and two of his children are on the board — will roughly double in size to about $5 billion. It will be able to greatly increase spending on birth control and on making abortions available, a cause supported by both Warren Buffett and his late wife, Susan Thompson Buffett. He has spoken relatively little about the issue in public, and neither did she.
The Buffett children have long been aware of their father's contempt for inherited wealth. "He signaled early and often to his children what his intentions were. They built their lives accordingly," said Sherry S. Barrat, president of personal financial services at the Northern Trust Company, a big Chicago bank that manages money for many wealthy families.
Indeed, Howard Buffett said, "It was always clear we were not going to get a lot of money. If my dad said, 'either you can have $50 million a year personally or $50 million a year for the foundation,' I'd put it in the foundation. What would you do with $50 million if you didn't give it away?"
All of Warren Buffett's gifts are planned to be stretched out over about 20 years. (Warren Buffett declined to be interviewed for this article).
The Buffett siblings said they support the large gift, valued at about $31 billion, to the Gates' foundation. "Gates is geared up, doing all sorts of worldwide stuff," Howard Buffett said. "They're prepared to handle it."
Like their father, who despite his wealth could easily pass for an insurance man (which in the simplest terms he is), the younger Buffetts stand in stark contrast with so many other children of wealth.
They live comfortably, though not lavishly. They get some money from their father. And they appear to be working hard at their foundations and at other pursuits. In interviews, they returned again and again to their upbringing.
"When I was little, every night my dad rocked me to sleep and sang 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow,' " said Susie Buffett, the oldest, who is 52. She lives 10 blocks from her father in Omaha and still calls him Daddy, she said.
"I just think of him as my dad," said Howard Buffett, 51. Howard looks like his father, sporting big 1970's-style glasses and the beginnings of a sandy-colored comb-over. The son of a technophobe, Howard said he won't touch e-mail. He lives here in Decatur, near an 800-acre farm he owns, and spends much of his time traveling the world to photograph wildlife and poor people.
Peter Buffett, 48, is a new age musician and composer who plays the keyboard. He has just moved from Milwaukee to New York City, where he finds people are far more impressed by wealth than in his native Midwest.
His mother was an occasional nightclub singer, but he credits his father, too, for his musical success. "He would always sing and whistle around the house," Peter Buffett said, who went to Standford for about a year and a half.
As children and young adults in the 1960's and 70's, the siblings said, their father was not yet famous. "We did not grow up with Warren being No. 2 on the list" of richest Americans, Susie Buffett said. "We grew up in a normal situation."
The family housed high school foreign-exchange students. As teenagers 18 months apart, Susie and Howard fought over the family car.
The investing genius's children went off to college and all three dropped out before graduating. "I had a great run in high school, academically, and then I got to college and just struggled," said Howard, who spent one year at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D., and one year at University of California, Irvine. When he told his parents he was quitting school, he said, "neither of them was very happy about it."
Howard loved heavy machinery. He bought a bulldozer and began doing residential excavation work around Omaha. His father got him a job at See's Candies, a Berkshire-owned company, in California. There, Howard met his future wife, Devon, who already had four daughters, and they all moved back to Omaha. "I missed the Midwest," he said. They also had a son together.
Howard is the only Republican in the Buffett family, he said. Asked who is the most liberal of the Buffetts, Howard rolled his eyes. "They're all liberal," he said.
Susie initially majored in home economics. "If we didn't have foundations to run, Howie would farm. I would be sewing, knitting and quilting," she said.
She dropped out of the University of California, Irvine, just shy of an undergraduate degree because she was enjoying work as an administrative assistant, making $525 a month. "I thought, boy, it just doesn't get any better than this."
She moved to Washington, working at magazines, initially as an assistant. There she met her husband, Allen Greenberg, a lawyer for Public Citizen, a liberal public health advocacy group. Warren Buffett? "I had never heard of him," Mr. Greenberg said in an interview.
The business mogul and public interest lawyer, however, came to admire each other. Susie said her husband told her in the late 1980's, " 'I think the smartest, most interesting person you could work for is your dad, but I don't want you to tell him that.' "
Mr. Buffett, she said, in turn asked his daughter, " 'If Allen could do anything, what would it be?' " Soon, the couple moved to Omaha and Mr. Greenberg went to work at the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation.
Mr. Greenberg and Susie Buffett divorced, amicably, about 10 years ago. They have two children. Susie currently runs her foundation and serves on the board of the trust named for her mom.
Warren Buffett's original plan was to leave most of his fortune to that foundation. He expected his wife to outlive him and that she would oversee the charitable work. But she died in 2004.
That same year, the foundation gave away about $21 million. Planned Parenthood and some of its local chapters received large grants. So did some other providers of, and advocates for, reproductive services, including abortion. The foundation also seeks to finance nuclear nonproliferation efforts. But it has found few chances for nongovernment entities to exert influence in that field, Mr. Greenberg said.
He declined to comment on grants involving birth control. The foundation is wary of anti-abortion sentiment. Pampered Chef, owned by Berkshire, was the target of a boycott organized by anti-abortion advocates displeased that some Berkshire contributions went to the abortion-rights foundation. So, in 2003, Mr. Buffett ended the charitable contribution program at Berkshire.
Mr. Buffett, however, is giving that foundation almost three times as much as he is giving each foundation run by his children. He did not explain why. And it also has $2 billion to $2.5 billion from the estate of Mrs. Buffett. Its gifts could increase to more than $200 million a year.
Peter Buffett and his wife, Jennifer, 40, run his foundation together, and they are slowly educating themselves on what it will take to run a bigger institution. They are proud of their early-education grants, following his sister's lead, and of a small grant that helped a Canadian Indian tribe recover one of its totem poles that ended up in Sweden.
They plan to consult with philanthropy experts, Bill and Melinda Gates included. "We're going to do great things," Jennifer Buffett said, citing basic human needs like clean water, education, health care and nutrition. As for specifics, "ask us in a year," she said.
All three siblings may find a $1 billion foundation significantly more work than one a tenth that size. "It takes some work. They're going to have to find some staff to help them," said Michael Cawley, president of the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation in Ardmore, Okla., which has about $1 billion in funds.
To pursue its founder's goal of improving agriculture, the Noble Foundation employs more than 300 people and directly conducts research. By closely managing operations, "our comfort is higher," Mr. Cawley said.
The Buffett children each said they plan to operate with just a handful of staff members, giving to groups that then directly perform charitable work. Their father, after all, runs one of the country's biggest corporations with an office staff in Omaha of fewer than two dozen.
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