Buffett lunch auction heading to record high price above $13M

As this year's charity auction of a lunch with Warren Buffett heads toward its live-streamed conclusion tonight, the top bid is a record $13,141,314.

Bidders need to be pre-qualified to make it harder for someone to troll the auction.

There were no auctions in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic.

The most recent winner was cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun, who paid a then-record $4.6 million in 2019. He told CNBC he hoped to build a "bridge" between Buffett and the cryptocurrency/blockchain industry.

After several delays, Buffett had dinner at an Omaha country club with Sun (wearing a gray jacket in the photo below) and four of his guests in January 2020, just before the pandemic gained steam. 

Facebook/H.E. Justin Sun

Since 2000, the Buffett lunch auctions have raised more than $34 million for Glide in San Francisco.

It calls itself a "nationally recognized center for social justice, dedicated to fighting systemic injustices, creating pathways out of poverty and crisis, and transforming lives."

Buffett's first wife, Susan, volunteered for the organization before her death in 2004.

This year's event will be end last in the series. No word on why Buffett is ending the tradition.

Buffett gives away another $4 billion

Warren Buffett has donated $4 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares that have been converted from his Class A holdings.

As part of his plan announced in 2006, Buffett is giving around $3 billion in stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In a tweet, Bill Gates wrote that Buffett's gifts have "moved me to tears" over the years:

The remaining $1 billion is going to family foundations.

Before he started his annual donations, Buffett owned almost 475 thousand Class A shares valued at more than $40 billion at the time. He now has 229 thousand.

The almost 246 thousand shares he has contributed would be worth $99 billion at their current price of more than $403 thousand per share.

His current net worth is estimated at $93 billion by Forbes. If he had held on to those shares, it would be around $192 billion. That would put him in second place after Elon Musk's estimated $214 billion and ahead of the $139 billion estimate for Bernard Arnault and his family.

Howard Buffett's foundation donates $2.7M to support Ukraine

Howard Buffett, Warren's oldest son, runs one of the family foundations receiving a donation.

Last week, he was in Kyiv for a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Early this week, he told CNBC's "Squawk Box" that his charity is donating $2.7 million to a citizen-funded nonprofit that will deliver nine 50-passenger buses to the Ukrainian Territory Defense Forces.

"I’ve never quite seen anything like this in my lifetime. It’s millions of refugees trying to leave the country and it’s just an overwhelming situation for the country... I believe we’ve got to support Ukraine in this fight. It’s a difficult fight for them."

BUFFETT AROUND THE INTERNET

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• Business Insider: Tech billionaire Mark Cuban warns of a painful shake-out in stocks and crypto — and quotes Warren Buffett to support his prediction

• MoneyWise on Yahoo Finance: Bitcoin's crashing — here's why Warren Buffett has hated it all along

BERKSHIRE STOCK WATCH

BERKSHIRE'S TOP U.S. STOCK HOLDINGS - June 17, 2022

Berkshire's top holdings of disclosed publicly-traded U.S. stocks by market value, based on today's closing prices.

Holdings are as of March 31, 2022 as reported in Berkshire Hathaway’s 13F filing on May 16, 2022, except for Apple, Bank of America, and U.S. Bancorp, which also include shares held as of Mar 31, 2022 as disclosed in New England Asset Management’s 13F filing on May 14, 2022, and except for Occidental Petroleum, which is as of May 12, 2022.

In addition to U.S. stocks, shares held as of December 31, 2021 of China's BYD, as listed in Buffett's 2021 letter to shareholders, are included. The price of those shares in U.S. trading is used to approximate the current market value of the position. The value of the stake as a percentage of the company's market value is fixed at what was listed as of December 31, 2021 in the letter.

The full list of holdings and current market values is available from CNBC.com's Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker.

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS

Please send any questions or comments about the newsletter to me at alex.crippen@nbcuni.com. (Sorry, but we don't forward questions or comments to Buffett himself.)

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-- Alex Crippen, Editor, Warren Buffett Watch