By Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) -Warren Buffett donated another $5.3 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:) stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, his largest annual donation since he started it in 2006.
Buffett’s donation increased his total charitable giving to about $57 billion, including to family charities in the last two Novembers.
The latest donation, announced Friday, included approximately 13 million Berkshire Class B shares.
Buffett donated 9.93 million shares to the Gates Foundation and has donated a total of more than $43 billion in Berkshire shares.
He also donated 993,035 shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after his late first wife, and 695,122 shares to each of three charities headed by his children Howard, Susan and Peter: the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation and the NoVo. Foundation.
The 93-year-old Buffett plans to give away more than 99% of the fortune he built at Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire, which he has run since 1965, with his children serving as executors of his will.
Berkshire is a roughly $880 billion conglomerate that owns dozens of companies, including BNSF railroad and Geico auto insurance, and stocks like Apple (NASDAQ:).
Buffett still owns 14.5% of Berkshire’s outstanding shares, a filing Friday showed, despite giving away more than half of his shares since 2006.
His $128.4 billion fortune makes him the tenth richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine.
In a statement, Buffett said he was worth about $44 billion when the donations began, but that the benefits of the combination, the “simple and generally sound capital deployment” in Berkshire and the “American tailwind” produced his current wealth.
Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates also pioneered the Giving Pledge, which saw 245 people such as Sam Altman, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Mark Zuckerberg dedicate at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation works to advance reproductive health. The Howard G. Buffett Foundation works to alleviate hunger, alleviate conflict, including in Ukraine, and improve public safety. The Sherwood Foundation supports nonprofits in Nebraska, and the NoVo Foundation has initiatives focused on girls and women.
Friday’s filing suggests, based on Buffett’s holdings, that Berkshire has repurchased few, if any, of its own shares since April 19.
