The tides have turned. After 20 years and $47.9 billion in donations that made the Gates Foundation Warren Buffett’s biggest beneficiary, it did not receive a single cent in 2026, while 75% of his nearly $6 billion Berkshire giveaway went to his late wife’s foundation.

Nothing in life is constant, no matter how sturdy something may seem. Warren Buffett and the Gates Foundation are now proving exactly that. After donating $47.9 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation over two decades, the billionaire investor has left it out of his annual giving for the first time since the program began in 2006. For nearly 20 years, the Gates Foundation was Buffett’s single biggest philanthropic beneficiary. In 2026, however, it received nothing from his annual Berkshire giveaway. Instead, Buffett donated 12 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares worth nearly $6 billion to four Buffett-family foundations.

The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation received 9 million shares, while the Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation received 1 million shares each. The latter three are respectively associated with his children Susie, Howard and Peter Buffett. The Gates Foundation, and longtime friend Bill Gates, were conspicuously absent from the announcement. Buffett also made it clear where his remaining Berkshire fortune is headed, according to Yahoo, “Of course, mortality is unpredictable, but my remaining shares will be donated to the four foundations one way or the other by December 31, 2034,” the 95-year-old Oracle of Omaha said. In other words, this was not merely a one-year reshuffling of his charitable gifts. Buffett has now explicitly said that his remaining Berkshire shares are destined for those four foundations.

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In June 2025, Buffett donated roughly $6 billion worth of Berkshire shares across five foundations. The Gates Foundation alone received 9,433,839 shares worth about $4.6 billion, or roughly 76% of all the shares he donated that year. By comparison, the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation received just 943,384 shares, or about 7.6% of the total.
12 months later, those proportions were almost completely reversed. The Gates Foundation went from receiving roughly 76% of Buffett’s annual giveaway to 0, while the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation surged from about 7.6% to 75%, receiving 9 million of the 12 million shares Buffett distributed in 2026.

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Philanthropy is not the only part of Buffett’s life undergoing a change. The 95-year-old investor, whose fortune currently stands at roughly $147 billion, also relinquished the CEO position at Berkshire Hathaway at the start of 2026, handing the job to his hand-picked successor Greg Abel after six decades at the helm. Buffett remains chairman, but taken together, the changes made in 2026 are astronomical and dictate the future starting with putting the final pieces of his succession and legacy plans into place.

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