A Family Foundation Is About to Become One of the Nation’s Wealthiest

By Suzanne Perry

The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after the late wife of the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett,

is about as publicity-shy as they come. It has no general Web site, its president — Mr. Buffett’s former son-in-law, Allen Greenberg — rarely speaks to journalists, and it publishes no details about its grants.

But after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it reaped the biggest windfall from Mr. Buffett’s recent philanthropic spending spree. Mr. Buffett announced that he was donating one million shares of his Berkshire Hathaway stock — today worth about $3-billion — to the foundation that he and Mrs. Buffett set up more than 40 years ago.

“[We] established the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation to focus intensely on important societal problems that had very limited funding constituencies,” Mr. Buffett said in a letter to the foundation’s board. “Under Allen’s leadership, the foundation has succeeded beyond our high expectations — delivering enormous results per dollar spent.”

Protests Over Abortion Grants

The grant maker, known simply as the Buffett Foundation before Mrs. Buffett’s death from a stroke in 2004, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the years supporting population-control, family-planning, and abortion-rights projects, both in the United States and abroad.

That has made it a target of anti-abortion groups, one reason it may prefer to keep a low profile.

“Warren Buffett’s philanthropy aims at killing pre-born children not curing childhood disease, eliminating the poor not poverty, and destroying the developing world not aiding development,” Father Thomas J. Euteneuer, president of Human Life International, in Front Royal, Va., said after Mr. Buffett’s gift was announced. He said Mr. Buffett could become “the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy.”

In addition to its family-planning grants, the foundation gives cash awards to outstanding Omaha teachers and scholarships to Nebraska residents attending state colleges and universities.

Mr. Buffett pledged to transfer to the foundation 5 percent of the promised shares this month, followed by 5 percent of the remaining shares each year that he is alive. He will rewrite his will to ensure the balance is transferred after his death. He said in his letter that his gift will allow the foundation to more than double its spending, adding $150-million to its annual budget. (The foundation spent $122.5-million in 2005.)

A Big Bequest

Mr. Buffett’s gift marks the second time in two years that the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation has received a big donation. In 2004, Mrs. Buffett’s will left to the foundation stock that then had an estimated value of about $2.4-billion. Once that money is transferred — the estate is still being settled — it will add considerably to the foundation’s assets, which stood at $318.5-million in 2005. The organization could then be among the country’s 20 wealthiest foundations. If Mr. Buffett’s donation were for some reason to be transferred all at once, instead of in stages, the value of both gifts would push the foundation into the top 10.

While the two gifts will transform it into something of a spending powerhouse, the foundation will not grow nearly as large as once expected. Before Mr. Buffett announced his donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he had said he would leave the bulk of his fortune to the foundation that he helped to create.

“I came to realize that there was a terrific foundation that was already scaled up, that wouldn’t have to go through the real grind of getting to a megasize like the Buffett Foundation would, and that could productively use my money now,” Mr. Buffett told Fortune magazine.

Mr. Greenberg declined to be interviewed for this article. But Susie Buffett, Mr. Buffett’s daughter and a member of the foundation’s board, said he is “very comfortable” with the arrangement. “He’s been a part of the discussion,” she says. “He’s right there at the table with all of us.”

Ms. Buffett, was once married to Mr. Greenberg, says it would have been “overwhelming” for the foundation, which now has only five employees, to absorb Mr. Buffett’s billions. She praises her ex-husband’s performance. “He’s been running the foundation for close to 20 years,” she says. “My parents trust him, love him, respect him. He’s brilliant.”

She said he also loves traveling and getting directly involved in the foundation’s programs, while running a mega-foundation might have forced him to become a “bureaucrat guy.”

But reflecting the foundation’s desire to operate under the radar, Ms. Buffett would not discuss how it plans to spend its new influx of cash.

That skittishness is shared by some of its grant recipients. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America — which was awarded more than $4- million by the foundation in 2005 — declined to comment on its grants. “We have always respected the privacy of our funders,” says Elizabeth Toledo, vice president of communications.

But Daniel E. Pellegrom, president of Pathfinder International, in Watertown, Mass., called Susan Buffett “an amazing, generous, extraordinary woman” and praised the Buffetts for their willingness to take on controversial subjects. He estimates that Pathfinder, which operates family-planning programs in developing countries, has received about $15-million from the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, mostly for its work in Vietnam.

“[Mrs. Buffett] understood that women who were impoverished who were denied the opportunity to control their own fertility were likely to perpetuate their poverty,” he says.

Ben Gose contributed to this article.