Warren Buffett | Getting Rich is Easy
Speaker: Feel that they have to create a dynasty or anything, and they give it back to society, and a great many do it anonymously. They do it in many states to some extent. We see a little, some concentration of it in Nebraska because, uh, they generally, uh, when you, when you're giving away a lot of money, they call it in the philanthropic world; they call it absorption capacity.
And truth is, it's very, it's very hard to give away a billion dollars to $10 at a time to people who are needy or something of the sort. And so large institutions have this absorption capacity, which tend to be universities or colleges or that sort of thing. And some philanthropies are much more imaginative than others.
But the one thing I've never—well, most of them want to do it anonymously, so I can't tell their specific stories, but I have to say one thing that was astounding is that the same day we bought a billion dollars worth of Bergkshire Class A stock from Ruth. So that, and I guess we were actually buying it from the, the school at that point because he's just given them the—and then, so the transaction was with them, but Mark Bard in our office bought a billion dollars from them, but he also bought $500 million worth of stock from somebody else that nobody will ever have heard of.
And in a different state, and I won't elaborate beyond that, but we have had a very significant number of people, and there's more to come. Uh, and obviously they had to be people that came in early, or their parents did, or their grandparents did, but they've all lived good lives. They haven't denied themselves anything. I mean, you know, they have second homes, and they—but they generally, uh, well, in fact, I would say almost universally, people knew them in the community and everything, but they've, uh, they've used what they, accomp, what they saved. They denied themselves consumption, themselves. That's what savings are: consumption deferred.
Uh, and, uh, they've, uh, they've given, uh, they've financed everything all over the country, and usually they like to do it anonymously. I, I outed my sister when I wrote about her in the annual report, but, but, uh, uh, Ernie's here today, and, uh, uh, she