How Warren Buffett's Son Would Feed the World

Howard G. Buffett has spent most of his life as a farmer, with little financial support from his father until recently. Now he runs a multibillion-dollar foundation dedicated to ending world hunger.

- Nina Munk

WHEN HIS THREE children were young, Warren Buffett installed a dime slot machine on the third floor of the family’s house, in Omaha, Nebraska. The objective was to convey the dangers of gambling, but it also meant the children’s allowance remained in his hands. “I could then give my children any allowance they wanted, as long as it was in dimes, and I’d have it all back by nightfall,” he remarked once at a Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.

Buffett—who, despite being worth about $60 billion, has lived for 58 years in that same relatively modest house, for which he paid $31,500 in 1958—once told Fortune magazine that he intended to leave his three children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” He added that “a few hundred thousand dollars” sounded about right. Providing children with “a lifetime supply of food stamps just because they came out of the right womb” was “harmful,” he said—“an antisocial act.”

For a long time, in response to charges that he was ungenerous, Buffett argued that society was best served if, instead of giving away his money during his lifetime, he carried on compounding it, year after year, to maximize the amount that could be given away when he died. Eventually, he had a change of heart. Perhaps it was age that made the difference. Perhaps, as some people believe, it was the death of his wife, Susan Thompson Buffett, in 2004, that inspired his benevolence.