That's recent, just as of the last couple months. Historically the children's foundations have been a sideshow and he's given the bulk of his wealth away to the Gates Foundation. You can see that from the dollar amounts: this year's gift to the children's foundations was 1M BRK-B shares (the equivalent of about $500M) to each, while he's given away a total of $66B, over 120x as much.

Though unlikely the case here, family foundations should always be looked at as a likely source of corruption.

You cannot bribe me directly - that would be caught. However you can donate money to my family foundation and my kids (or spouse) will draw a large salary from it while doing almost nothing and they do some good for the world so it looks like a charity. Of course the kids/spouse will support me in various ways that all rich kids will.

Again, probably not what is happening here, but every time you hear of a family foundation you should ask who they are using it to corruption in some form. Even when it doesn't seem to be you should still look.

My hot take is that men with extreme wealth and power are desperate to keep it as part of their identity, where the women I mentioned do not have the same character and personality flaws, and therefore use it as a tool to do good because they are not optimizing for status, power, and wealth: they are optimizing to do good. Doesn't always hold, there are exceptions.

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority." -- Lord Action

Sure that is the typical way to donate your wealth but there are many other ways than giving it with control to your children. I have no judgement but doing it this way is a nice way to move money within your family.

Everyone does it different and I have no judgement but you could just as easily pick a quorum of folks to do the job with a very explicit timeline. Charitable donations are quite broad in the US. So sure lots of wealthy folk don’t this way but not everyone!

If it's so difficult, maybe they could take the easy option and, you know, properly fund the government to build the shared infrastructure on which we all rely by paying tax proportional to their wealth.

This makes sense as long as public control makes the outcome of that money better than letting the bazillionare control it. I'm not sure which way the actual truth tilts, but I suspect it's sometimes one and sometimes the other.