Friday, October 10, 2014
NoVo Co-President Peter Buffett Uses New Notoriety to Champion Women and Girls Around the World
For most of his 56 years, Peter lived a pretty average, anonymous life: marriage, kids, a low-profile music career. That all changed in 2006 when his dad, Warren Buffett, announced to the world that he planned to give away the bulk of his fortune — now estimated at $67 billion — including a billion to each of his three kids’ charities.
Peter and his wife, Jennifer, run the now $3 billion NoVo Foundation, dedicated to helping women and girls around the globe. Last year, he wrote a controversial op-ed for the New York Times called “The Charitable Industrial Complex” criticizing self-satisfied “philanthropic colonialism” and urged philanthropists to rethink their assumptions: “Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market,” he wrote. “Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex....”