Warren Buffett Just Gave Away $6 Billion of Berkshire Stock. He Plans to Give Away $138 Billion More by 2034.
The $6 billion gift is the small part. The deadline attached to the rest is what shareholders should notice.
Overview
Warren Buffett gave away about $6 billion of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRKA)(NYSE: BRKB) stock this week: 9 million Class B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 1 million each to three foundations run by his children. The bigger number is what remains -- a stake worth about $138 billion that the 95-year-old chairman says he wants fully donated by Dec. 31, 2034.
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The mechanics matter here. Buffett's fortune sits in Class A shares, each convertible at any time into 1,500 Class B shares, and the conversion only works in that direction. This week's gift of 12 million B shares took 8,000 A shares to create. Buffett owned 196,317 Class A shares as of Berkshire's March proxy statement, so the roughly 188,000 that remain are worth about $138 billion at the current Class A price of about $733,000, as of this writing.
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Originally published at www.fool.com.