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Warren Buffett Toasts The World's Two Greatest Philanthropists, Bill And Melinda Gates

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Bill and Melinda Gates have given away over $29 billion, more money than anyone in the history of humanity. But the way in which they have given away that money—turning philanthropy into their fulltime professions—is equally unprecedented, their close friend Warren Buffett told a packed room of 200 billionaires, leaders and social entrepreneurs at the fourth annual Forbes Summit on Philanthropy Wednesday night.

“I’ve studied the great foundations, whether it’s Rockefeller or Carnegie or Julius Rosenwald or George Eastman or Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Henry Ford, you name them,” Buffett said before giving Gates the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy. “But in no case did the founders of those foundations remotely pour the personal time and effort and brainpower into their foundations that Bill and Melinda have. They have been spending, and I’ve observed it, certainly 50 hours a week, maybe averaging 60 hours a week.”

All summit participants spent their day working, tackling some of the biggest questions in philanthropy, like what role their money should play in politics and what donor’s dollars can do to fight the most challenging neurological diseases. The day was capped off by a dinner and awards presentations. Buffett won the philanthropy award the first time it was presented two years ago. Last year the Oracle of Omaha presented it to Chuck Feeney, a former billionaire committed to going broke on philanthropy, who both Buffett and Gates see as an inspiration.

It is Gates’ energy and passion that convinced Buffett to pledge the bulk of his $70 billion fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, combining the philanthropic efforts of the two richest men in America and two of the greatest philanthropists of all time.

“(Melinda) is like me, loving the foundation work, including the amazing opportunity we got when Warren added a significant amount of his success to ours to let us be even more ambitious,” said Gates, who is worth an estimated $80 billion. “My simple message about philanthropy is that I’ve had a lot of fun jobs, but none of them has been as fun as partnering with Melinda and working on this, where there is really progress.”

So far, the results have been impressive. Gates’ favorite graph shows that childhood death has cut in half in the last 25 years. And with continued efforts by his foundation and others, he thinks it is possible to slash that figure by 50% again.

Also on the agenda: eradicating polio. There has not been a single new confirmed case of the disease anywhere in Africa in the last nine months, Gates said, and now it just remains in pockets of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He expects those countries will report their last cases of polio sometime in the next year.

“We’re very much on track for polio eradication,” Gates said. “We can build on that. We’ll take that, then we’ll go after malaria, we’ll go after measles.”

In a room of luminaries whose aggregate net worth approached a half trillion dollars and whose work has affected billions of people, Buffett was not the only person awed by the amount of brainpower—in addition to money—that Bill Gates has devoted to philanthropy. Partners In Health cofounder Paul Farmer, the subject of the 2003 bestseller Mountains Beyond Mountains and winner of 2015 Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Social Entrepreneurship, said he was traveling in Africa with Gates one time when they decided to hike up a mountain to see gorillas up-close. “So we go up to the top of this mountain, straight up,” Farmer said. “And we’re sitting there, and there is this beautiful silver-backed gorilla sitting not five feet from Bill Gates, and he turns around to me and says, ‘Now where were we in talking about this tuberculosis vaccine?’”

 

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