Warren Buffett is donating approximately $6 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway shares as part of his billionaire-investor pledge to give away most of his fortune.
Roughly 9.43 million of the shares will go to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, which Buffett has supported for nearly two decades.
The remaining shares will be split among his children's foundations—the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the NoVo Foundation—as well as the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named after his late wife.
The donations, set to be completed on Monday, will reduce Buffett's stake in Berkshire to 198,117 Class A shares and 1,144 Class B shares.
"The mathematics of the lifetime commitments to the five foundations are interesting," Buffett said, according to the release. "The five foundations have received Berkshire B shares that had a value when received of about $60 billion, substantially more than my entire net worth in 2006."
According to Buffett, he has never sold a single share of Berkshire, and has no intention of doing so. He said he converted A shares into B shares before making contributions.
"I have no debts and my remaining A shares are worth about $145 billion, well over 99 percent of my net worth," Buffett said. "My will provides that about 99.5 percent of my estate is destined for philanthropic usage."
In 1965, Buffett famously took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a then-large but struggling textile maker in Omaha, Nebraska, through an investment partnership. The textile business shut down in 1985, but Buffett kept the Berkshire name as he transformed the company into one of the most successful conglomerates in history.
Reflecting on the company's success, Buffett said that "nothing extraordinary" had happened at Berkshire, instead attributing its rise to "a very long runway, simple and generally sound decisions, the American tailwind, and compounding effects."