Warren Buffett is giving away his entire fortune, the whole $140 billion Berkshire Hathaway stake, by 2034. This summer he moved the first $6 billion of it into four family foundations run by his children and ended his longtime gifts to the Gates Foundation for good. The coverage that followed asked the questions news sources always ask: was this generosity, tax strategy, timing, or some mix of the three? Would it slow money getting to the people who actually need it?
Fortune invited our Founder & CEO, Janetta Cravens, to weigh in as someone who has spent two decades advising both donors and the nonprofits they fund, and sits on boards of directors for both public charities and foundations. Her answer: the tax benefit is real, but almost every billionaire gets it, so it doesn't explain much on its own. What's actually worth paying attention to is how Buffett is giving the money away. On the timing question specifically, she pointed out that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in July 2025, made the federal estate tax exemption permanent at $15 million per person. "If anything," she told Fortune, "the law removed urgency rather than created it." Whatever is driving this pace of giving, it isn't a tax deadline. That deadline came and went a year ago, and Congress closed it in donors' favor.
The Real Difference Is Disclosure, Not Amount
If the tax outcome looks about the same whether a billionaire gives now or gives later, what actually separates one person's giving from another's? The answer comes down to structure. A private foundation like the ones Buffett is using has to publish every grant it makes, every year, in a federal filing anyone can pull up. It also has to pay out at least 5% of its assets annually, or pay an excise tax on whatever it fell short. Critics of that 5% rule call it a license to warehouse money: hit the minimum, let the rest sit and grow, indefinitely. That criticism holds up in plenty of cases. It doesn't hold up here. Buffett's family foundations spend well past that floor. Inside Philanthropy reports five-year average payout rates of roughly 41% at the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, 59% at the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and 87% at the Sherwood Foundation. Those numbers look like an operating charity's budget, not an endowment quietly compounding in the background.
Compare that to the option Buffett didn't take. A donor-advised fund offers the same upfront tax deduction and asks for nothing in return: no required payout, no public record of a single grant. Janetta made this point directly to Fortune: "The alternative to a disclosed, floor-bound vehicle usually isn't more democratic giving. It's less accountable giving." Buffett had the option sitting right there and didn't reach for it.
You're Already a Philanthropist
It's easy to read all of this as a billionaire's problem, several zeroes removed from anything a small nonprofit deals with day to day. That gap closes fast once you look at how philanthropy scholars actually define the word. Robert Payton and Michael Moody, whose work anchors the curriculum at Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, define philanthropy simply as “private action for the public good.” There's no dollar threshold in that definition, and no foundation required. By that measure, "nonprofit" was probably always the wrong name for this sector, since it describes us by what we don't do instead of what we actually do. We're the philanthropic sector, and most people reading this already qualify.
Think about how many organizations exist because a founder covered the first year of costs out of pocket, long before an outside donor showed up. Think about the hours board members give that nobody bills for, or the staff who show up early and stay late because they care about what the mission is building, not because it makes up for what they're paid. It shouldn't have to make up for that, and it doesn't. That kind of care is its own private resource, spent on a public good, and it has nothing to do with what's in a paycheck.
So ask the same question of your own organization that reporters were asking about Buffett. Why are you doing this? What are you actually pointing your time and your name and your energy at? And would you make the same choice to be open about it if nothing required you to?
Accountability In Focus
Every organization eventually gets asked some version of these questions. A funder doing due diligence, a journalist working a story, a new board member trying to understand what they joined, an employee explaining on the way out why they left. Answering those well, without scrambling or turning defensive, usually means you already asked yourself first. Buffett is the example: reporters came in assuming a tax dodge or a warehouse of wealth, and the suspicion mostly disappeared once there was a clear, already-examined answer waiting for them. Readiness like that comes from asking the question before anyone forces it.
It's also one of the few reliable ways to catch drift before it hardens into identity. Programs accumulate. Grants get chased for being available rather than for fitting the mission. Staff time shifts toward whatever's loudest right now. It’s the slow stack of small decisions that aren’t questioned, until an organization looks up one day and doesn't quite recognize what it's become. Asking the questions – why are we doing this? – on a regular schedule catches drift while it's still easy to fix.
Also, there's a trust dividend that builds over time. People trust organizations that answer hard questions directly instead of managing the answer. An organization that's visibly comfortable being asked why it's doing what it's doing earns that trust for the same reason a person who answers directly does. Silence breeds suspicion whether or not anything is actually wrong. Willingness to be asked is most of what people are actually testing for.
Operating in the Light
Getting comfortable with scrutiny is the foundation of accountability and it takes more than good intentions. Accountability is stewardship, taking private resources and spending them on a public good, which becomes felt – experienced and believed – once it’s visible to whoever has a stake in the outcome. Visibility has to be deliberate. It has to reach the right audience, at the right time, and carry the message of intent.
Accountability isn’t accountable unless others can see it.
I see the philanthropic sector get this right in small, ordinary ways all the time. A staff member gets thanked by name for something specific they did well. Every manager gets trained to run a performance review the same way, so accountability doesn't depend on which supervisor someone happened to have. Teams build real feedback loops and open themselves to “fail forward.” Staff meetings become a place where someone can say what didn't work without fear of reprisal. A climate survey goes out, and afterward, the people who filled it out actually hear what came through and what leadership plans to do about it.
Private resources in the form of ideas and honest opinions, offered for public good, in the form of a better workplace for everyone who works there.
But I also see the philanthropic sector get it wrong sometimes, too. It’s when activity gets mistaken for virtue and damages trust and the effort to “be transparent” moves beyond the governing group. Some boards adopt open-meeting rules they were never legally required to follow, subjecting members to unnecessary criminal penalties. Or, occasionally a board member gets uneasy about a decision and takes it on themselves to tell people what's "really going on," a post, a letter to stakeholders, before the board has even finished its own conversation. None of that is accountability. It's visibility that shows up at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, and the cleanup afterward usually costs more than the original issue did. Confidentiality during deliberation isn't a loophole around accountability. It's the condition that makes accountability possible later, especially on something hard like a closure or a merger, where a board needs the room to argue and disagree before any of that gets read by someone outside the room as a final decision.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A few questions worth asking about your accountability practices, especially when nothing is forcing the conversation. Where do we only make something visible because a filing requires it, and where have we actually built a habit of showing people what we're doing and what we're learning? Who's the right audience for this particular piece of information, the public, our funders, or just our own staff, and does what we're sharing actually match that audience? And where, in the name of being open, have we skipped the private work of finishing a hard conversation before we took it public?
Buffett's foundations will file the same disclosure and hit the same 5% test every year for as long as they exist, in years reporters are watching and in years they're not. Public charities already do something similar every year, filing a 990 whether or not anyone reads it. What most nonprofits will never move is billions of dollars. What they will move, however; year after year, is billions of other items: volunteer hours, staff commitments, donated goods, pallets of food, boxes of supplies. Resources that never show up on a balance sheet the size of Berkshire Hathaway's but add up to just as real a form of stewardship. The habit that makes this sector accountable isn't the size of what moves through it. It's the discipline of connecting decision-making to transparency, and understanding that we hold ourselves accountable first, before the public ever has to ask.
But every nonprofit can build the same habit underneath it: decide in advance what gets shared, with whom, and on what schedule, then keep doing it in the years nobody's asking. That habit, repeated without an audience, is what accountability actually looks like.