Buffett on Love, Succession, and Education (2024 Shareholder Letter)
English edition · Adapted from the Chinese original
Reading Buffett’s 2025 shareholder letter, I found myself moved to tears more than once. The letter never once mentions love, yet it brims with love’s quiet currents—a deep love for his wife, his children, and even ordinary people everywhere. It never once mentions death, yet it reveals a man nearing a hundred years old facing death with composure, and the compassionate heart with which he arranges things, as best he can, for others.
What I felt was not only the wisdom of a legendary investor, but the broad spirit of a father, a family member, a mentor, and a public figure of enormous influence. His understanding of wealth transcends personal gain and loss; he sees it as a force to drive social progress. His language is plain and unadorned, yet it holds profound thought: wealth is not the end of life but a bridge connecting opportunity and responsibility, used to help those who start behind at the starting line, and to create greater fairness and hope for the world. His letter is full of deep affection for ordinary people—a love that is neither loud nor showy, yet moistens the heart like a gentle stream, and moves you deeply.
In his love and support for his children, Buffett shows a distinctive wisdom. He did not simply give; through trust, guidance, and inspiration, he raised them into independent and responsible people. He believes in the importance of values, and he believes his children have the ability to inherit and carry these ideas forward. This love is a letting-go arrived at through careful thought, and an expression of boundless trust in the next generation.
And when he speaks of his estate, there is not a trace of showing off—only calm analysis and deep care for his family and society. He attends not only to how wealth is distributed, but to the meaning behind the distribution—making it a better bond for family and society, rather than a fuse for division. This balance of the emotional and the rational is at once warm and moving, letting us see how a person can use a lifetime of wisdom to plan a heroic journey that transcends individual success or failure.
Buffett’s letter tells us that true success lies not only in what you possess, but in how you use it to influence others and make the world better. This profound insight into wealth and life is like a beam of light, shining into the heart of every reader of this letter, and lighting up a road full of hope.
Full Translation
Today, Warren E. Buffett will convert 1,600 Class A shares into 2.4 million Class B shares in order to donate them to four family foundations: of these, 1.5 million shares will go to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and the remaining 300,000 shares will be donated to the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation, respectively.
The following is Mr. Buffett’s statement to shareholders:
Today, my donation will reduce my holdings of Berkshire Hathaway Class A shares to 206,363, a reduction of 56.6% from when I made my pledge to give in 2006. In 2004, before the death of my first wife, Susie, the two of us together held 508,998 Class A shares. For years we had assumed she would outlive me and would ultimately distribute the greater part of our vast fortune. But things did not turn out as we wished.
When Susie died, her estate was worth about 3 billion dollars, of which roughly 96% was donated to our foundations. In addition, she left 10 million dollars to each of our three children—the first time we had ever given any of them such a large gift. These bequests reflected a belief we had always held: that extremely wealthy parents should leave their children enough wealth to do anything, but not so much that they do nothing.
Susie and I always encouraged our children to take part in some small-scale charitable activities, and we were pleased with their enthusiasm, diligence, and results. But at the time of her death, they were not yet ready to take on the astonishing wealth generated by Berkshire stock. The living pledge I made in 2006 (and later expanded further), however, dramatically enlarged the scale of their charitable activity.
Today, the children have completely exceeded our expectations. After my death, they will bear full responsibility for gradually distributing all of my Berkshire holdings, which currently make up 99.5% of my wealth.
Father Time is merciless and always wins in the end. Yet his visits are unpredictable—sometimes unfair, even cruel, cutting a life short at its very beginning, and sometimes not arriving until a person is a hundred years old. So far I have been extraordinarily fortunate, but one day, my turn will come.
And yet, avoiding his gaze for too long is not without cost. Since I made my pledge to give in 2006, my children’s life expectancies have clearly shortened. They are now 71, 69, and 66 years old.
I never intended to build a family dynasty, and I never planned for my wealth to pass beyond my children to the next generation. I know my three children well, and I trust them completely. As for future descendants, that is an unknown. Who can foresee how generations to come, under a possibly very different charitable environment, will display their priorities, wisdom, and loyalty? And yet the vast fortune I have accumulated may take longer than my children’s lifetimes to distribute fully. Rather than letting a “cold hand” decide, it is better to let three living, clear-headed people make wiser choices.
For this reason, I have designated three potential successor trustees. They are very familiar to my children and have our unanimous approval. These three successors are also somewhat younger than my children.
For now, though, these successors remain on the “standby list.” I would prefer that Susie, Howie, and Peter personally complete the distribution of all my assets.
They fully respect my wishes: in the course of distributing the Berkshire shares, they must never betray the high trust that Berkshire shareholders placed in Charlie Munger and me. Between 2006 and 2024, I had the chance to observe how my children performed, and they too learned a great deal about large-scale philanthropy and human behavior. For years they have each led teams of 20 to 30 people, gaining a deep understanding of the unique workings and staffing models of charitable institutions.
Some wealthy friends are curious about the great trust I place in my children and their possible successors. They are especially surprised by one of my rules: that all foundation decisions must be made unanimously. They often ask, can such a rule really work?
On this, I have explained that my children will always face fervent requests from sincere friends and others. Another reality is that when someone applies for a large charitable grant, a “no” often prompts the applicant to try another route—whether asking other friends for help or changing the project proposal. Those able to distribute vast wealth are forever seen as “targets of opportunity.” This is a pressure inseparable from the responsibility.
For precisely this reason, I established the “unanimous consent” clause. It allows my children to give a clear and final answer to those seeking grants: “This is something my brother (or sister) would never agree to.” Such an answer is both decisive and puts an end to the pestering, easing the burden on my children’s lives.
Of course, this “unanimous consent” clause is not foolproof—if you have nine or ten children or stepchildren, it clearly isn’t practical. Moreover, it cannot fully solve the complex problem of how to wisely distribute billions each year.
I have one piece of advice for all parents, whether their wealth is ordinary or immense. When your children are mature enough, let them read your will before you sign it.
Make sure each child understands the logic of your decisions and the responsibilities they will need to bear after you are gone. If they have any questions or suggestions, listen carefully, and adopt the reasonable ones. You surely don’t want your children asking “why” about the decisions in your will when you can no longer answer.
Over the years, all three of my children have raised questions or offered opinions, and I have often taken their advice. There is nothing wrong with defending my own thinking. My father did the same with me back then.
Every few years I revise my will—usually with only small adjustments—and I always keep it simple and clear. Over the years, Charlie and I saw many families broken apart because provisions in a will caused confusion, even anger. Jealousy, and the real or imagined slights of childhood, are often magnified—especially when a son is favored over a daughter, whether in the distribution of wealth or in the assignment of important positions.
Charlie and I also saw cases where wealthy parents fully discussed the contents of their wills while still alive, and this actually brought the family closer together. Is that not a more gratifying outcome?
As I write these words, I still feel I am continuing an unbroken run of good fortune that began in 1930. That year, I was born a white male in the United States. My two sisters, though granted the promise of legal equality when the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, still found that promise unfulfilled in the reality of 1930. Even so, the ideal of equality had been rooted in American values as early as 1776, when our thirteen colonies won their independence.
Yet at the time of my birth, this country had not truly realized these ideals. Beginning in the 1970s, through the efforts of Billie Jean King, Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and countless others, society began to change step by step.
As a male, I benefited from my gender from the very start. When I was young, I was already confident about my future wealth. Yet neither I nor anyone else could have foreseen the speed and scale of the growth of American wealth over the past decades. It surpassed imagination, far beyond the dreams of the era of Ford, Carnegie, Morgan, or even Rockefeller. Billions became the new “millions.”
In the America of 1930, in the early days of the Great Depression, my birth hardly seemed to come at an ideal time. But the true miracle of a life’s wealth accumulation often appears in the final twenty years. Through a careful attitude of avoiding major mistakes, I am still alive today at the age of 94, and have accumulated a great deal of wealth—what might be called “the gift of deferred consumption.” This wealth can now be transferred to those who, at birth, drew a “lucky ticket.”
What makes me even more fortunate is that my philanthropic philosophy was fully supported and further developed by both of my wives. Whether my first wife, Susie, or her successor, Astrid, none of us believed that family wealth should be passed down through the generations.
On the contrary, we agreed that equality of opportunity should begin at birth, and that an extravagantly ostentatious lifestyle, though legal, is not to be admired. As a family, we had everything we needed or loved, but we never took pleasure in others’ envy of what we possessed.
What gratifies me even more is that many early Berkshire shareholders independently formed similar values. They knew how to accumulate wealth, live comfortably, and take care of their families, and at the same time, through the long-term compounding of growth, returned large or even vast fortunes to society. The “checks they cash” are now broadly helping the unfortunate. This kind of inheritance is undoubtedly a greater gift to society.
Holding to this philosophy, from my late twenties onward I lived life the way I wanted. Now, I have also watched my children grow into excellent citizens who contribute to society. Their views on many matters may differ from mine or from one another’s, but they have always held to shared and unwavering values.
Susie Buffett Jr., Howie, and Peter have each spent more time directly helping others than I have. They enjoy economic comfort, but have never been troubled by wealth. They learned these values from their mother, and were she still alive, she would surely be immensely proud of them.
And so am I.
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