Warren Buffet resigned as a trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He also donated $4.1 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares to charity.
Over the last 25 years, Buffet contributed around $27 billion to the Foundation. He has been a long time friend of Bill Gates.
The Foundation was launched in the year 2000 and is one of the world’s largest charitable organisations with assets worth $50 billion.Buffet was the only trustee alongwith Bill and Melinda. He does not own any shares in Microsoft to avoid any conflict of interests.
Bill and Melinda announced their decision to split recently but decided to continue running the foundation together and have planned to give away a large share of their wealth.
Buffet’s resignation has come as he is under scrutiny over his tax payments following the publication of his estimated tax returns by non-profit group ProPublica and his wealth increased to $105 billion. He defended his tax payments saying that he had very little income and that his wealth was deployed in tax paying businesses that he owned through Berkshire stockholdings.
