US: Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, the world's second-richest man, will start giving away almost all his wealth next month, most of it to a foundation run by the world's richest man, Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
The gift, worth more than $30 billion (€24 billion), will double the endowment of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and create a philanthropic organisation of unprecedented wealth and power.
"Life has dealt a terrible hand to literally billions of people around the world, and Bill and Melinda are bent on reducing that inequity to the extent they possibly can.
"If you think about it - if your goal is to return the money to society by attacking truly major problems that don't have a commensurate funding base - what could you find that's better than turning to a couple of people who are young, who are ungodly bright, whose ideas have been proven, who already have shown an ability to scale it up and do it right?" Mr Buffett told Fortune magazine.
Mr Buffett plans to give away 85 per cent of his $44 billion fortune in the form of shares in his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, to the Gates Foundation and four philanthropic groups run by family members.
Next month the Gates Foundation will receive 5 per cent of Mr Buffett's Berkshire shares, worth about $1.5 billion. Each subsequent year, the foundation will receive 5 per cent of Mr Buffett's remaining shares, as long as either Mr or Mrs Gates is still alive and involved in running the foundation.
The Gates Foundation focuses on health and education - fighting HIV, TB and malaria in poor countries and improving schools in the United States.
It already dispenses almost $1.5 billion a year in grants - more than twice as much as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
Mr Gates announced this month that he would scale down his role in Microsoft in 2008 and devote most of his time to running the foundation.
Mr Buffett has specified that from 2009, the foundation will have to spend the full value of his annual grant each year, on top of what it has been spending until now, a condition that will effectively double the foundation's annual spending.
Mr Buffett has long promised that his fortune would go to philanthropic causes, but he had insisted until now that he would give nothing away before his death. His change of heart follows the death of his wife Susie two years ago whom he had originally expected to run his estate.
"We agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should, in large part, be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the US in the second half of the last century," Mr Buffett said.
He said his children always knew they would not inherit the bulk of his wealth.
"I would argue that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home - I would say it's neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money," he said.
Mr Buffett said he hoped his decision would influence other philanthropists to consider pooling their resources rather than setting up rival foundations.
"What can be more logical, in whatever you want done, than finding someone better equipped than you are to do it?"