From farms to war zones: The down-to-earth son of Warren Buffett

Philanthropist Howard Buffett has photographed mountain gorillas and cheetahs in Africa. He’s also captured images of battle-hardened soldiers, child refugees, and bombed-out buildings in Ukraine, all while documenting the country’s once-productive farms — familiar terrain for a man who works on his own family farms in Illinois and Nebraska. In other words, Buffett is not your average philanthropist. The son of famed investor and mega-philanthropist Warren Buffett, Howard Buffett recently spoke at Devex World in Washington, D.C., where he sounded the alarm about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, likening it to a potential World War III. He displayed a mix of humor and humility that was somewhat incongruent for a man who gives away half a billion dollars a year — supported by his eponymous foundation that has 22 employees. But unlike his father, who signed the Giving Pledge to give away 99% of his wealth, Howard Buffett has no interest in leaving behind a splashy legacy or becoming a philanthropic role model. In fact, he says people who give a lot of money away often struggle to do it. “Making money and giving away money are two very, very different things,” he said to the standing room-only crowd. “They just don't know how they can do it, or want to do it, or are even held back because if you made a lot of money, you had certain basic principles you followed in business. Philanthropy really turns some of those principles upside down, and how do you get comfortable with that when you spent your whole life amassing a fortune and now you're going to turn all those principles upside down and give it away? That is really not easy for a lot of people.” Buffett has managed though, and in the process, created a unique resume — at one point he served as sheriff of Macon County, Illinois. As a conservationist, he has traveled to over 150 countries and authored 15 books on conservation, wildlife, and the human condition. One of those trips proved pivotal in shifting his mindset about philanthropy. “I was working on something once that had to do with high-yield agriculture and environmental impact and all that, and then a guy said to me, ‘You know, no one's going to starve to save a tree.’ That one sentence probably changed what I did in philanthropy more than any other sentence that anybody ever said to me,” he recalled. “So that changed my whole mindset, and I started thinking, you can't save wildlife, you can't save cheetahs, you can't save any species unless human beings can exist in a reasonable way that they don't destroy what's around them, because it's for survival,” he said. “So when I heard people will not starve to save a tree, I thought, ‘OK, I gotta understand that better. So I went out, I tried to understand it better.” “And this is a really tough lesson I learned in philanthropy … is people don't care about things unless it affects them.” --— Philanthropist Howard Buffett One of the places where he sought to better understand that dynamic was Ukraine — and he didn’t mince words about the support — or rather lack thereof — it has received as he easily switched gears from discussing the types of soils the U.S. Midwest has to the geopolitics of Russia, Iran, and North Korea wanting to “destroy” the U.S. “We have enemies that absolutely want to take away every freedom that you have, and that's who Ukraine is fighting,” he warned. “Our narrative has been this kind of false statement of, ‘We're going to stand with Ukraine as long as it takes,’ and that doesn't really mean much, because right now what we're doing is standing with Ukraine long enough for them to fight and die, and we have no strategy,” he bluntly said, arguing that the U.S. has “dribbled” materiel into Ukraine but not nearly enough of it to defeat Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. “So if you study Putin and you study World War II, what you'll see is the fact that we are operating out of fear of escalating this war,” he said. But by doing this, “we are escalating the war because Putin will respond to that. That is exactly what Putin responds to, is the fact that he thinks he sees weakness and he has patience.” “Innocent civilians have been killed. Women have been raped. People have been executed — and all of this is documented,” he added. “There's just no way to comprehend it, to be honest with you, and so it makes it very hard to articulate it and convey it to people.” “And this is a really tough lesson I learned in philanthropy — and we learned it really well when we worked in Africa — is people don't care about things unless it affects them. That is pretty much true. So I can tell you about Ukraine, but then you're going to go home and cook dinner and get your kids ready for school and everything that goes on in your daily life. It doesn't really affect you, unless intellectually you can grasp the magnitude of what's happening.” As much as he’s trying to convey the gravity of what’s happening in Europe, Buffett also gave glimpses of his lighter side, including a story where he got caught fibbing to his family. “So I'm sitting on a farm outside Erie, Pennsylvania, somewhere. … I'm on a farm, surely there's no reporter in the room, right? So someone says, ‘What's your family think about you going to Ukraine?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I have that handled. My sister called me once when I was in Brussels, and she said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘I'm in Brussels.’ ‘How long are you going to be there?’ ‘Oh, I'm here for a few days.’ Well, I left Brussels and went to Ukraine for five or six days.” He thought it was his little secret, but it was a reporter he was talking to — who then wrote up the anecdote. “My sister calls me out and says, ‘Brussels, huh?’” Update, Oct. 30, 2024: This article and headline have been updated to reflect Howard Buffett’s net worth.