Last weekend, Warren Buffett, Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, released his annual shareholder letter as usual. What is quite unusual is that the contemporary "stock god", who has never talked much about privacy, mentioned her sister Bertie as many as 20 times in the letter, stating that she has become a philanthropist who can make billions of dollars in donations by holding Berkshire stocks.
Some curious readers have raised the question: Who is this Bertie? Is donating billions of dollars true?
Who is Bertie?
Firstly, we must marvel at the longevity genes of the Buffett family. Although Buffett's father, former congressman Howard Buffett, passed away at the age of 62, Buffett's mother Laila Buffett passed away at the age of 92.
In Warren Buffett's generation, there were a total of three children, all of whom lived over 90 years old: the oldest, Dorothy Buffett, was born in 1928 and passed away in 2020; Second brother Warren Buffett, born in 1930; The youngest Bertie, Roberta Buffett Elliott, was born in November 1933, just over three months after his 90th birthday.
(Three person group photos taken in 1937 and 2003, source: Buffett family)
It must be noted that there are very few descriptions of Buffett's sister on the Internet, so this year Buffett's shareholder letter is the most detailed disclosure.
According to the data, Bertie graduated from Northwestern University in the United States with a Bachelor's degree in History in 1954. In 1955 (Buffett said 1956), Bertie married medical student Robert Snow. The two have a total of four daughters, three of whom are still alive.
Buffett stated that since getting married, Bertie has been an active financial investor for nearly 20 years - buying bonds, mutual funds, and frequently traded stocks, and he was also an early investor in Berkshire during the Buffett era.
Due to Robert Snow's obituary, he got married again in 1987. So it can be inferred that Bertie divorced her first husband in the 1980s. Buffett also wrote in his letter that by 1980, when Bertie was 46 years old, he had made an independent decision - no longer actively trading positions, but only holding mutual funds and Berkshire stocks. In the following 43 years, she did not make any new transactions.
This decision also made Bertie a successful investor who could donate billions of dollars.
No one knows how many Berkshire stocks Bertie has bought, so her yield can only be estimated. When Buffett bought Berkshire in a fit of anger in the 1960s, the company's stock price was only around $10. Since Berkshire's A-shares have never been split, it is also easy to calculate - if you bought $1000 Berkshire shares in 1964 based on trust in the new management, the investment value to date is $53.62 million.
From another perspective, in 1980, when Bertie changed his position and stuck to Berkshire, the company's stock price had just exceeded $200. As of today, the price of a Berkshire A-share has exceeded $610000.
Bertie, who is nostalgic for the past
Public information shows that Bertie has made many donations, but the most famous are two donations worth billions of dollars.
In 2015, Bertie donated $100 million to Northwestern University to establish the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. On the official website of Northwestern University, the photo hanging is of Bertie and her then husband David Elliott. The two dated in 1954, and half a century later, their old relationship reignited and they got married in 2008. David passed away in 2017.
(Source: Northwestern University)
In 2017, Bertie donated $105 million to the Monterey Peninsula Community Hospital (CHOMP) in California to help the local community. Her first husband, Snow, also worked as an orthopedic doctor at this hospital while practicing privately.
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