Jimmy Buffett Left His Widow a Trust and a Fight

Jimmy Buffett died at home in Sag Harbor on a Friday, the first of September, 2023, with family and friends around him. That is the first line of the family's statement, and it is the line I keep coming back to. Eight days later his wife posted a note of her own. She thanked the doctors and the nurses and the hospice workers. She said he had been an optimist to the end, smiling and joking when he was very sick, and she passed along a line of his, that growing old is not for sissies. She signed it, Love, Jane.

I have been thinking about that note this week because of what came after it: a lawsuit, then another, then an appeal, and now a trial date. The story is worth your time even if you have never read a trust and hope never to. A husband did everything the advisers tell you to do. His widow found out what the advice leaves out.

Here is what he signed. Buffett set up a trust in 1990 and amended it in April 2017 and again in July 2023, in the last summer of his life. His will made Jane his executor. The rest of his assets went into what the documents call a marital trust, for her sole benefit for the rest of her life, with the three children, Savannah, Delaney and Cameron, to receive whatever remains when she dies. He named two trustees to run it. One was Jane. The other was Richard Mozenter, an accountant who had been his business manager and financial adviser for more than 30 years.

Every estate lawyer in America has drawn that picture on a legal pad. The spouse and the professional, side by side, each a check on the other. It is the first page of the manual. In the Buffett file it held for about 21 months.

By the first week of June 2025 the two trustees were suing each other, he in Palm Beach County, Fla., she in Los Angeles. Her petition said he had "spent the next 16 months stonewalling and making excuses for why he could not yet provide the requested information," that the trust had paid "more than $1.7 million in 2024 to him and his firm," and that he had told her the assets, which the filings put at about $275 million, would bring her less than $2 million a year in net income. His petition said Jimmy had "repeatedly expressed his concerns regarding Jane's ability to manage and control his assets" and had been "very careful to create the trust in a manner that precluded Jane from having actual control over the trust."

Those are the two sides' papers, and I will leave them where they lie. What passed between these two people is known to them and to no one who wasn't in the room. The law they walked into is known to everyone, and it is short and, in its way, merciless.

Florida's trust code says co-trustees who cannot reach a unanimous decision "may act by majority decision." Read that again with the two trustees he named in mind. Two people cannot form a majority. This is not a deep point, but it is where the case began. For the 21 months after his death every disagreement between his wife and his accountant was a tie, and a tie goes to a judge.

The judge is Charles E. Burton of Palm Beach County; Jane dropped her Los Angeles case and brought hers to him as a counterclaim. On Aug. 27, 2025, he sent the widow and the accountant to mediation "so that each party fully understands their fiduciary duties." The same order kept a trust company, Coral Gables Trust Co., on as a third trustee, which Jane could ask the court to remove. How it got there the reports do not say. Three can form a majority. Mediation did not settle it. Mr. Mozenter had drawn up a new trust and proposed pouring the marital trust into it, telling the court that "modifying Jane's power of appointment would mitigate her repeated threats to disinherit her children." Her lawyers called it "an unconscionable power-grab."

Then came the lawyers' bills, which is where this stops being a story about one family. On Feb. 18 Judge Burton ruled that Mr. Mozenter may pay his lawyers out of the trust, and turned down Jane's plea to stop him and claw back about $2 million she said had already gone. Her motion said it in a line: "Every dollar Mr. Mozenter spends on his litigation against Jane is a dollar taken from the Trust." His filing called her motions a waste of the court's time and the trust's money. The judge noted that the court "has never heard any sworn testimony or evidence in this case," and he had the statute on his side. A trustee accused of breaching a trust may pay his defense from it, and a court must deny the beneficiary's objection unless it finds "a reasonable basis to conclude that there has been a breach of trust," and may deny it even then for "good cause."

Jane appealed, the judge would not pause his order while she did, and on Aug. 20 the Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed in one word, which reached the Palm Beach papers this month. Her April complaint, as the Palm Beach Daily News described it, says the first statements she saw came last October, a messy batch of them online, and that by the end of November he had paid roughly $6.4 million from the trust to himself, his firm and outside counsel; his lawyers called it "a continuation of Mrs. Buffett's smear campaign." They are set for a bench trial on Jan. 19, 2027, if the date holds and the case does not settle first.

What is not in dispute is which way the money flows while everyone waits.

I want to say something in defense of the statute, because I think it is right in principle and wrong in its arithmetic. A trustee sued for carrying out the design a dead man chose should not have to fund his defense from his own pocket; if he did, no accountant in Florida would agree to serve beside a spouse. The arithmetic is that the money leaves before anyone has sworn to anything, and may keep leaving even where a judge sees reason to think there was a breach. A rule like that is predictable, which I prize in law. It is predictable in one direction.

There is a second law in this story, quieter than the first. A marital trust, in the estate tax's sense of the phrase, puts off the tax until the second death, and the Internal Revenue Code names the price: the surviving spouse must be "entitled to all the income from the property, payable annually or at more frequent intervals." The Treasury regulation behind it keeps the deduction safe for a trustee who holds property that earns little, so long as the trust requires him, or lets the spouse require him, to "make the property productive or convert it within a reasonable time." Whether the Buffett trust was drawn that way the reporting does not show; I have read the reports, not the trust. But the name is the trade's name for exactly that trust, and her complaint, $275 million projected to yield her less than $2 million a year, is the complaint the rule has in view. The estate got the deferral so that she would get the income.

Courts have been asked before to pry a chosen fiduciary loose from a fortune, and they are slow to do it. I think they are right to be. Thirty-three years ago this week, on Oct. 28, 1993, Doris Duke died, leaving an estate New York's highest court later put at "over one billion dollars." Her will named Bernard Lafferty, "described as her assistant and confidant," as the only individual co-executor. In May 1995 the Surrogate removed him on a report with no sworn statements, citing among other things his "lavish personal spending habits and limited literacy." The Court of Appeals reversed: "Removal of a fiduciary constitutes a judicial nullification of the testator's choice and may only be decreed when the grounds set forth in the relevant statutes have been clearly established." The dead keep their choice until the living prove a ground.

Florida wrote its grounds down. A court may remove a trustee for "a serious breach of trust," for unfitness, or where "the lack of cooperation among cotrustees substantially impairs the administration of the trust." The first of those and the last are the grounds this fight is pleaded under. Her Florida complaint says he "repeatedly" breached his fiduciary duty; his suit says she has been "completely uncooperative." The statute does not say which of two co-trustees who cannot work together should go. It hands the question to a judge, and the trust pays one side's way to his courtroom.

Jimmy Buffett did the textbook thing. He wrote the trust early, revised it as his life changed, named the wife he married in 1977 and set a professional beside her. The textbook assumes the two will agree, or that one will yield. The paragraph that would have spared his widow this courtroom, the one that says who decides when the two of you cannot, costs nothing to write, and almost nobody writes it.

Illinois, where I live, says the same two things in nearly the same words: co-trustees who cannot agree "may act by majority decision," and a court may remove a trustee where "lack of cooperation among co-trustees substantially impairs the administration of the trust." So this is what I would want in a trust of my own before Thanksgiving, and what I would ask about if I were the spouse in one. I would want to know how many trustees there are, and if the answer is two, I would want a tiebreaker: a third trustee, or a sentence saying which of the two decides which questions. I would want the spouse able to remove the professional and name a successor from a class the document describes, so the power cannot be used to install a friend. I would want a line saying who pays for a fight between the trustees. And I would want the statements written into the document. Florida's floor is one accounting a year. A trust that means quarterly should say quarterly.

Jane Buffett's note that September thanked the hospice workers and the nurses, and it passed along her husband's line about growing old. He was right about that, and I would add that being a widow with a co-trustee is not for sissies either. The trust he left her runs to many pages, as these documents do. The page she needed was one paragraph long, and it is the paragraph nobody reads aloud at the signing.

Columns are the views of their authors. They are not legal advice and not the position of the firm.