Warren Buffett said that fellow billionaire Bill Gates' association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was "in bad taste" to him, but that he decided to stop donating to the Gates Foundation because his children are old and ready to distribute his wealth.
"I tell my kids that it's theirs and it's their responsibility to do the job right," Buffett said in excerpts of an interview published by CNBC today.
The comments came a day after the 95-year-old chairman of Berkshire Hathaway left the Gates Foundation out of his annual mid-year donations, when he gave away nearly $6 billion worth of his conglomerate's shares, Reuters reports.
Buffett has donated more than $47 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares to the Gates Foundation since 2006.
His latest donation, which includes 12 million Class B shares, will instead be directed to four foundations run by his children Susie, Howard and Peter.
Following these donations, Buffett will have donated a total of more than $23 billion in Berkshire Hathaway shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation since 2006.
Buffett says Gates "made mistakes"
Buffett said Gates, his longtime friend who was also a member of Berkshire Hathaway's board of directors for 16 years, visited him in Omaha three weeks ago.
The meeting came after the US Department of Justice released documents in February about Gates' relationship with Epstein, including their attempts to collaborate on philanthropy.
Gates also met with members of Congress last month about the financier. He has repeatedly expressed regret for any association with Epstein and has not been charged with any crime, Reuters reports.
"Although it's distasteful and although he made mistakes, I've made mistakes too when I hired people or chose friends, only to later discover that, in one way or another, they weren't who I thought they were," Buffett said.
Buffett, however, said that donating to the Gates Foundation was a "good decision" and said he has no regrets about his relationship with Bill Gates.
"We had a lot of great times together," Buffett said. "It was a wonderful friendship."
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, after being arrested on charges of human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The New York medical examiner ruled it a suicide.
"Maintain clarity of mind"
In a statement released Tuesday, Buffett also accelerated the deadline for distributing Berkshire Hathaway's remaining shares, which represent approximately 13 percent of the conglomerate's $1,06 trillion stake.
Buffett now wants the shares to be distributed by the end of 2034, instead of within ten years of his death. He cited the increasing age of his children as the reason. Susie Buffett, the oldest of them, will be 81 at the end of 2034.
"I've reassessed the whole situation," Buffett told CNBC. "It's not just about mortality. It's about keeping your sanity."
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