Three children in their seventies, $10 million each from their mother, a job rather than a fortune from their father, and a deadline of 31 December 2034 to give the lot away.
On 14 July 2026 Warren Buffett converted 8,000 of his Berkshire Hathaway A shares into 12 million B shares and gave them to four foundations: 9 million to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife, and 1 million each to the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation, which are run by his daughter and his two sons. The parcel was worth close to $6 billion, InvestmentNews reported. It left him with 188,290 A shares and 1,162 B shares, a holding the Associated Press valued at more than $140 billion, and it came with the sentence that settles a question people have asked about the richest grandfather in Omaha for twenty years. “My remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations one way or the other by December 31, 2034.”
So the short answer to the question in the search box, who are Warren Buffett’s heirs, is nobody, in the sense most people mean it. His three children, Susie, Howard and Peter, inherit a task. Here is what the family’s own paperwork says they get, what they already have, and what they are expected to do with it.
The $10 million from their mother was “the first large gift”
Susan Thompson Buffett died in 2004. Her estate, Buffett wrote in his Thanksgiving letter of 25 November 2024, was roughly $3 billion, and about 96% of it went to the couple’s foundation. “Additionally, she left $10 million to each of our three children, the first large gift we had given to any of them.” The principle behind the figure he put in a single line, the one that has since been quoted at a great many dinner tables: hugely wealthy parents should leave their children “enough so they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing.” His own fortune is 99½% Berkshire stock, by his count, and all of it is going to the foundations. “I’ve never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children.”
Why the shares were never coming to the children
The letter is candid about 2004. “At her death, however, they were not ready to handle the staggering wealth that Berkshire shares had generated.” What followed was two decades of practice with their father’s money. The 2006 pledge sent Berkshire stock every summer to the children’s three foundations as well as to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and the Gates Foundation, and by September 2024 the three had, on the Associated Press’s count, given away more than $15 billion of it. Each, their father wrote, “has overseen teams of 20-30 for many years”. By 2024 they had “more than justified our hopes”.
What they get instead of the shares is a trust and a rule. On his death the children “will have full responsibility for gradually distributing all of my Berkshire holdings”, and every action of that trust requires a unanimous vote. The clause is practical rather than sentimental. People who can give away billions are, he wrote, forever regarded as “targets of opportunity”, and the unanimity rule hands his children an immediate and final reply to anyone with a worthy cause and a persuasive manner: “It’s not something that would ever receive my brother’s consent.” Three successor trustees, “somewhat younger than my children”, have been chosen and are “on the wait list”. There is advice in the same letter for parents of any means: when your children are mature, “have them read your will before you sign it.”
The “honeymoon” letter: why the money started leaving faster
A year later, on 10 November 2025, the children were “72, 70 and 67”, all above normal retirement age, and the letter changed gear. “To improve the probability that they will dispose of what will essentially be my entire estate before alternate trustees replace them, I need to step up the pace of lifetime gifts to their three foundations.” The three were at their prime in experience and wisdom “but have yet to enter old age. That ‘honeymoon’ period will not last forever.” Each had by then handled annual sums “irregularly increased to more than $500 million”. And then the sentence that every estate lawyer in America has since had read back to them: “Ruling from the grave does not have a great record, and I have never had an urge to do so.”
He gave 2.7 million B shares that day, said he would keep a block of A shares until shareholders were as comfortable with Greg Abel, the incoming chief executive, as they had been with him and Charlie Munger, and announced that he would no longer write the annual report. “As the British would say, I’m ‘going quiet.’ Sort of.” The three alternate trustees, he added, are not ranked and are not tied to a particular child.
What the July 2026 gift changed: a date, and a name left off the list
The July release did two things. It set the deadline, with the grants to each child’s foundation to grow every year and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation’s “at a somewhat greater rate”, and it listed four recipients rather than five. The Gates Foundation, which had received Berkshire shares every summer since 2006, was not among them, and Bloomberg noted that it was the first midsummer in two decades without a Gates gift, with the foundation absent from the list of future recipients too. Buffett gave no reason in the release. He had already said, in June 2024, that his fortune would go after his death to a charitable trust run by his children rather than to the Gates Foundation, and the Associated Press estimated then that the three would have about $144 billion to give away within ten years. The 2034 date simply put a day on the calendar.
The three who have to spend it
Susie Buffett, the eldest, chairs the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and runs the Sherwood Foundation in Omaha, whose largest grantee is the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, which she also chairs; her former husband Allen Greenberg is Sherwood’s president and her brother Peter sits on its board. Howard Buffett farms in Illinois and runs the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, whose money goes mainly to food security and to places in conflict; a $500 million commitment to agriculture in Rwanda was described by Inside Philanthropy in 2017 as one of the largest single bets in philanthropy, and Ukraine has had much of his attention since 2022. Peter Buffett, a composer, runs the NoVo Foundation, for many years centred on women and girls. Only Howard has a Berkshire role, and it is the top one: a director since 1993, he was elected chairman on 18 September 2026, with his father staying on the board as chairman emeritus. “Greg runs the company; Howard will guard its culture and values,” Warren Buffett wrote that day. The job their father has given all three is the one he has done since 1956, deciding where capital should go, with the difference that the return is measured in other people’s lives and the whole position has to be closed out by the end of 2034.
Two family stories that explain the rule
The first is the kitchen. Living in Washington with a new baby, Susie wanted to extend the kitchen of her house and asked her father for a loan of about $41,000, the figure the Globe and Mail put on it in 2011. Alice Schroeder’s biography The Snowball records the answer: “Why not go to the bank?” In the HBO film Becoming Warren Buffett, in 2017, Susie said she had some trouble with that one, because she thought she was asking for a loan, not for him to give her the money. The second is Nicole Buffett, adopted by Peter at the age of four during his first marriage, who appeared in Jamie Johnson’s 2006 documentary The One Percent and then on Oprah, saying she felt “completely excluded” from the family’s wealth and its giving. About a month later, Marie Claire reported, a letter signed “Warren” told her she had not been adopted “emotionally or legally” as a grandchild. The grandchildren were never in the plan; the 2024 letter says so in as many words, and Nicole’s own account is that her education and living costs had been paid.
Set beside the $140 billion, the two stories read less like meanness than like the same instruction given at different volumes. The children were to get enough and not too much. The grandchildren were to get the children. And the money was to go, all of it, to work. “If my children simply do a decent job,” the 2025 letter ends on the subject, “they can be certain that their mother and I would be pleased.”
Cover photograph: US International Trade Administration via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
