Warren Buffett Net Worth: $145 Billion, Barely Dented by a $6 Billion Gift
6 min readUpdated 22 August 2026
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6 min readUpdated 22 August 2026
Warren Buffett's net worth was $145 billion, according to Forbes' "Top 10 Richest People In The World" list dated 1 August 2026, where he took the last spot on the list, tenth globally. Five days earlier, on 14 July 2026, Buffett had given away roughly $6 billion of his own Berkshire Hathaway stock. His fortune barely moved.
That is the story this week's series has been building toward. Every profile so far has asked how knowable a fortune really is. Buffett's answer is the cleanest of the seven: fully public, fully disclosed, and now shrinking on a schedule he set himself.
| Publisher | Date | Figure | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forbes Real-Time Billionaires | 7 January 2026 | $146.5 billion | #9 world |
| Bloomberg Billionaires Index | early 2026 | ~$150 billion | same general period |
| Forbes, "Top 10 Richest People In The World" | 1 August 2026 | $145 billion | #10 world |
| Berkshire Hathaway Class B (BRK.B) | 1 August 2026 | $512.37/share | 8-month high (CNBC) |
| Berkshire Hathaway Class A (BRK.A) | 6 August 2026 | $786,000/share | MacroTrends |
Forbes' own number moved less than 1.5% across seven months, from $146.5 billion in January to $145 billion in August, even though Buffett gave away billions in stock in between. Bloomberg's separate estimate, at roughly $150 billion over the same stretch, sits within a few percent of Forbes', a narrower gap than almost anywhere else in this series.
Nearly all of it is Berkshire Hathaway stock. Buffett said it himself in a company release: Berkshire makes up "roughly 99 and a half percent" of his net worth, a structural fact that hasn't changed in 2026 coverage.
Berkshire has two share classes. Class A is the original stock, convertible into 1,500 shares of Class B at the holder's option, and carries far more voting power per dollar of value than Class B does. Per Berkshire's March 2026 proxy statement, cited by The Motley Fool on 17 July 2026, Buffett held 196,317 Class A shares, representing about 30.0% of Berkshire's voting power but only about 13.7% of its economic value. The same structural gap between control and ownership showed up in this series on Mark Zuckerberg's profile, at a very different ratio: Meta's dual-class stock gives him roughly 61% of the vote against 13-14% of the economic ownership. Different companies, same mechanism.
After the July donation, Buffett's Class A-equivalent count fell to 188,290 shares, per a Motley Fool article dated 18 July 2026.
On 14 July 2026, Buffett converted 8,000 Class A shares into 12 million Class B shares and gave them to four family foundations: 9 million shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, and 1 million each to the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation, a gift valued at roughly $6 billion (Forbes, CNBC, The Motley Fool, all reporting 14-19 July 2026). For the first time since 2006, the Gates Foundation was left off the list, a decision multiple outlets tied to Bill Gates' documented past ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Buffett called Gates' conduct "distasteful" while saying he did not regret two decades of earlier giving to the foundation.
Working against that giveaway, Berkshire's own stock had a strong stretch. BRK.B closed at $512.37 on 1 August 2026, its highest level since late November, per CNBC. That rally is most of why Forbes' number barely dropped even after a $6 billion gift: the stake he kept simply became worth more. Berkshire was also due to report second-quarter earnings the same week, per CNBC's 1 August 2026 report, a routine event this article does not attempt to get ahead of.
Buffett also stepped down as Berkshire's CEO at the end of 2025. Greg Abel became CEO on 1 January 2026, with Buffett staying on as executive chairman, per CBS News and Seeking Alpha reporting from that transition. The net worth trackers still price Buffett's personal stake the same way; what changes going forward is who is making the operating decisions behind it.
More knowable than any other fortune this series has covered. Berkshire is a fully public, SEC-reporting company with no family holding vehicle standing between Buffett and his shares, unlike Robert Budi Hartono's stake in BCA, held through a private holding company one layer removed from the bank itself. Buffett's exact share count is a matter of public filing, down to the individual share, which is why Forbes and Bloomberg land within a few percent of each other rather than the multiples this series found in wholly private conglomerates like Sukanto Tanoto's Royal Golden Eagle.
What makes Buffett's number unusual isn't disagreement between trackers. It's that the number is falling on purpose, in public, on a stated timeline, which none of the other six people profiled this week are doing.
Buffett's fortune is built on one position held for six decades, and that concentration is also the whole reason his percentage returns compounded into a historic outcome. That is not a strategy most portfolios should copy. The same 99% concentration that made Buffett one of the richest people alive is, by definition, a single point of failure, and it worked out for him only because of an unusually long, unusually successful run. NetWort's gains breakdown shows which single holding is actually driving your own portfolio's returns, in your own numbers, so you can see your own concentration before a rally or a drawdown decides it for you. If your own biggest position is doing more work than you realized, portfolio concentration risk covers what that actually costs.