Warren Buffett has given away more than $58 billion, Reuters reports. His son Peter’s entire personal inheritance was $90,000 of Berkshire Hathaway stock, handed over at 19 and spent on recording equipment.
Bill Gates has said his three children will receive less than 1% of a fortune that Forbes’ real-time profile put at $114.2bn on 4 October 2026, ranking him 14th on that year’s Forbes 400.
A note on method, because this is a subject where numbers travel faster than their sources. No figure below is a filed or disclosed sum. Net worths are third-party market estimates from Forbes, Bloomberg’s index and, in one case, Celebrity Net Worth, and each moves with the share price and the day. Every quotation is traced to the interview, letter or pledge where it was first given; where the original could not be located, the words are paraphrased or left out. The famous lines attributed to Sting and Elton John are not in this piece for exactly that reason.
Less than 1%
Gates was 69 when he published the May 2025 post that reset this entire search category. His children with Melinda French Gates are Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe, reported in 2024 as 28, 25 and 22. What they get is a ceiling rather than a sum, and the family has never put a dollar figure against it.
He told the podcaster Raj Shamani that his children got a great upbringing and education, but less than 1% of the total wealth because he decided it wouldn’t be a favour to them, adding that it is not a dynasty and he is not asking them to run Microsoft. One per cent of $114.2bn is $1.14bn. The stated number is less than that, divided three ways, and the arithmetic is the only part anyone outside the family can do.
$200 billion
On 8 May 2025, Gates said the Gates Foundation, established in 2000, would sunset its operations on 31 December 2045 after spending more than $200 billion in its final twenty years. He published a hand-drawn chart of his own net worth falling toward zero and said his wealth would drop by 99%. He has donated more than $63.9 billion to the foundation to date.
The deadline is the interesting part. Most philanthropic vehicles are built to last forever, which means they are built to be run by someone’s descendants. Gates wrote that people will say a lot of things about him when he dies, and that he is determined “he died rich” will not be one of them.
$90,000
Peter Buffett has said he received one personal inheritance from his father: $90,000 of Berkshire Hathaway stock at the age of 19, which he spent on recording equipment, according to Fortune’s account of his remarks. He is the only heir anywhere in this piece who has described his own non-inheritance on the record by name.
Compounded, that stock would be worth an amount nobody in the family has ever published. The recording equipment got used.
99.5%
Buffett, now 95, retired as Berkshire Hathaway chief executive at the end of 2025 and marked the Thanksgiving that followed with a letter of roughly 1,500 words, published alongside his annual gift to four family foundations. The position has not shifted since he first gave it to Fortune in 1986: hugely wealthy parents should leave their children enough money to do anything but not enough that they can do nothing. Howard, Susan and Peter will not inherit the bulk of the fortune. They will direct where 99.5% of it goes.
“I’m not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when six billion others have much poorer hands than we do in life,” he said at a New York Public Library event in 2006, announcing that around 85% of his money would go to five charitable organisations, among them the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The 2026 number is the slipperiest in this piece. Forbes placed Buffett at $143.5bn in January 2026 in figures compiled by FinMasters and TheStreet, while Bloomberg’s index has tracked him nearer $145–150bn across the year. Reuters reports he has given away more than $58 billion, or 37% of his total wealth, leaving roughly $96.73 billion still to distribute. Anyone quoting a single settled Buffett figure for 2026 is quoting a day, not a fact.
The letter’s most repeatable instruction has nothing to do with sums. Buffett advises that when your children are mature, have them read your will before you sign it, so that each understands the logic and the responsibilities that arrive with the death.
$24.5 billion
Michael Bloomberg’s own biography records $24.5 billion given away in his lifetime as of 2025. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010, in the first wave, alongside Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor. CNBC’s 2017 compilation reported his fortune at around $50 billion at the time, a dated figure and a single source.
His pledge letter contains the sentence that does the most work in this entire genre, and it is addressed to parents rather than to heirs: the single best thing you can do for your children is to support organisations that will create a better world for them and their children. The pledge itself is a public moral commitment, not a binding instrument. It carries no enforcement, no filing and no deadline.
99 percent
On 1 December 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Dr Priscilla Chan published “A letter to our daughter”, addressed to their newborn, Max, committing 99 percent of their Facebook shares to philanthropy during their lifetimes. Fortune valued that holding at $45 billion at the time, and reported the couple’s stated goal of advancing human potential and promoting equality for all children in the next generation.
The pledge is denominated in shares, not dollars, and the shares are Meta’s. A percentage promise against a volatile asset over a lifetime is a very different object from a fixed bequest. It was written that way on purpose. For the opposite shape of the story, there is DDW on the Getty family.
$600 million
Simon Cowell’s fortune is cited almost everywhere at approximately $600 million. That number comes from Celebrity Net Worth and is repeated across outlets rather than filed, confirmed or disclosed, which makes it the softest figure on this list and the one most often quoted as hard.
He first set out the position in a 2013 interview with the Mirror, a year before his son Eric was born: the money would go to charity, children and dogs, and he did not believe in passing it from one generation to the next. Eric, 11 as of 2025 reporting, is his son with Lauren Silverman. On “The Morning Meeting” podcast, Cowell restated it: I don’t believe in passing on huge amounts of money, adding that he would go with what his own parents said, which was that college would be paid for and then you have to get on with it. The Tribune reported a wave of online backlash to the remarks, which is audience reaction rather than anything Cowell has retracted.
11 children
Sting has six children, Eliot, Joe, Mickey, Fuchsia, Jake and Giacomo, per the compilation Fortune ran in 2017. Andrew Lloyd Webber has five, and CNBC’s 2017 round-up reported him as worth over $1 billion with none of them set to get rich off the catalogue behind Phantom of the Opera and Cats.
Both men are quoted constantly on this subject. Both of those quotes trace back to tabloid interviews, with the Daily Mail and the Mirror, that could not be located in their original form, only in aggregation. So they appear here as positions reported by others, not as words in quotation marks. The gap between what a billionaire is famous for saying and what can be sourced to the day he said it is wider than the search results suggest.
250 signatories
The Giving Pledge, co-founded in 2010 by Buffett, Gates and Melinda French Gates, had more than 250 signatories from 30 countries as of October 2025 reporting on the pledge’s own site. It is the reason this list keeps getting longer and the reason its entries keep sounding alike.
Which leaves the question every reader arrives with. The children are not cut off. In each verified case here the plan is redirection rather than estrangement: an education paid for, early money given, a foundation to administer, and in the Buffetts’ arrangement, control over where 99.5% of one of the largest fortunes on earth eventually lands. Buffett adds one further item, which costs nothing and is the hardest to copy. He wants his children to read the will before he signs it.
Cover photograph: Mark Hirschey via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
