Warren Buffett transferred about $6 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock this week, moving 12 million Class B shares to four family foundations and putting a definitive timeline on the dispersal of his remaining $138 billion stake. The 95-year-old chairman said he intends to donate all remaining shares by Dec. 31, 2034, a deadline that gives shareholders eight years of visibility into a governance shift that has been underway since 2006.
The mechanics of the gift underscore how the conversion works. Each Class A share converts into 1,500 Class B shares, a one-way transaction that this week consumed 8,000 A shares to create the 12 million B shares distributed, 9 million to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 1 million each to the three foundations run by his children. Berkshire's March proxy showed Buffett holding 196,317 Class A shares; the roughly 188,000 that remain are valued at about $138 billion at the current Class A price of roughly $733,000.
Annual donations have been a fixture since 2006, with more than $47 billion of Berkshire stock directed to the Gates Foundation alone over that span. This year marked a departure: the entire allocation went to the family foundations rather than being split with Gates. For shareholders, the scheduled supply is modest relative to a conglomerate valued around $1.1 trillion. Spread over eight years, $138 billion amounts to roughly $17 billion of stock a year finding new owners, a pace Berkshire can partially absorb through its own repurchases, $234 million in the first quarter, and a cash and Treasury bill pile that stood at about $373 billion at year-end.
The bigger change is control. A Class B share carries one ten-thousandth of a Class A share's voting power, so every conversion shrinks the voting block that has anchored Berkshire's governance for decades. Buffett's voting power stood at 30.2 percent as of the proxy, and the gradual dispersion of A shares means that by the mid-2030s the company Greg Abel runs will likely have no single shareholder with a controlling grip.
The gifts do not alter what Berkshire owns or earns; they alter who votes. As transitions of power go, a slow, pre-announced handover is about as gentle as it gets, giving the market and the board a long runway to adjust to a post-Buffett ownership structure.