My Response to my friend, Warren Buffett
June 18, 2010

 

My Charitable Giving Plan

It has been clear to me since my earliest childhood memories that my reason for being was to help others. The desire to give back was the impetus for pursuing an education in business, for applying that education to founding what became a successful container company, and for using that experience to grow our differentiated chemicals corporation into the global enterprise it has become.

The journey which began in poverty somehow led to my name’s inclusion on the Richest Americans list for several years running. We progressed from being leveraged to the eyeballs to realizing a degree of wealth of which we had never dared to dream, always with the understanding that it was not ours to keep. Through hard work, luck at the right times, and a determination to succeed, we built a company which filled our coffers with money intended for others.

My pledge to give my entire fortune to curing cancer and assisting related other charities was formalized decades ago. As my sweet mother took her last breath in my arms and succumbed to the cancer she could no longer fight, I realized that our humanitarian focus must center on cancer. I saw with clarity the vision that the Huntsman fortune is a means to cure cancer and that my purpose on earth is to facilitate the research which will illuminate its mysteries.

Most of my shares of our company’s stock have already been donated to our family charitable foundation and are not at our family’s disposal. Moreover, most of our other assets are already pledged to charitable causes. The Chronicle of Philanthropy listed our family as donating $1.2 billion to past charitable causes or foundations.

Cancer terrifies us and often takes our lives, irrespective of age, gender, or walk of life. As I have publicly stated countless times, my duty is to make sure cancer is vanquished. Virtually all of my financial resources are already pledged to this lofty goal.