These high-profile figures will not be leaving a lot of their fortunes to their children
High-profile figures such as singer Sting, investor Warren Buffett and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay have all said they will not be leaving their much of their fortunes to their children.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett along with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates, founded the Giving Pledge, a campaign to get the ultra-wealthy to pledge half their fortunes to charitable causes.
Most recently, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, has pledged to give half her fortune away to charity and signed the Giving Pledge in May. In July, when the divorce is finalized, MacKenzie will hold a 4 percent stake in Amazon, worth more than $36 billion. Jeff Bezos has not signed the pledge.
Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, said he planned on leaving his three children $2 billion each of his estimated $87.5 billion fortune, The Washington Post reported. The rest, or more than 99 percent of his wealth, is going to philanthropic causes. He told Fortune in 1986 that the right amount of money to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.''
Meanwhile, Gates has not said how much his children will inherit but he told the Daily Mail in 2011 that it was “a miniscule portion.”
"'It's not a favor to kids to have them have huge sums of wealth," he told “The Morning” in 2016, according to SF Gate. "It distorts anything they might do, creating their own path."
Gates has pledged to donate their fortunes to philanthropic causes.
Warren Buffett (left) and Bill Gates (right) co-founded the Giving Pledge. (AP/Reuters)
"It's not a favor to kids to have them have huge sums of wealth," he said. "It distorts anything they might do, creating their own path."
Singer Sting told the Daily Mail in 2011 that his children will not be left with trust funds.
“I certainly don’t want to leave them trust funds that are albatrosses round their necks,” the former Police singer told the Daily Mail. “They have to work. All my kids know that and they rarely ask me for anything, which I really respect and appreciate.”
Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay told The Telegraph in 2017 that he has no plans on leaving his wealth to this children.
“It’s definitely not going to them, and that’s not in a mean way; it’s to not spoil them,” he said.
The chef, who appears in television programs such as “MasterChef” that he has been lucky in his career.
“I’ve been super lucky, having that career for the last 15 years in the U.S,” he said. “Seriously, it has earned a fortune and I’ve been very lucky, so I respect everything I’ve got.”
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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also signed the Giving Pledge and announced “nearly all of my net worth will be given away in the years ahead or left to my foundation.”
Fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt died earlier this month, and the heiress most likely did not leave an inheritance for her son CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and other children. Cooper told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2014. that Vanderbilt had already made it clear “there is no inheritance.”
"My mom's made clear to me that there's no trust fund. There's none of that," Cooper told Stern. "[And] I don't believe in inheriting money."
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who's worth an estimated $13.3 billion, also signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 with his wife, saying their wealth was more than his family would need so he wanted to give back.
“We have more money than our family will ever need,” he wrote. ”There’s no need to hold onto it when it can be put to use today, to help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.”
Fox Business’ Katherine Lam and The Associated Press contributed to this report.