Both siblings agreed that giving away money is harder than people might think because there are so many causes competing for attention.
Plenty of Need
"Sometimes things feel so overwhelming and huge," Susan Buffett said. "You do think sometimes it would be so much easier to give to the opera. They would just take us to lunch and say, ‘Thank you.”’
Peter Buffett said he works hard to distinguish symptoms from the root causes of problems when he gives. He has also learned that there’s a whole industry around donating money and sometimes people try to curry favor by acting nice.
“Philanthropy is big business,” he said. “When you have a billion-dollar foundation, your jokes are funnier.”
The siblings said they agreed in general with their parents’ approach: to make the children work from an early age and not simply hand them money. But the billionaire investor is loosening up, they said.
"He has mellowed enormously from where he was," Susan Buffett said.