Theodore Schleifer
Just a few months after Warren Buffett convened a series of high-end dinners across America to collect signatures for something called the Giving Pledge, he was feeling optimistic about his new idea for philanthropy.
Seated in May 2010 at Charlie Rose’s table next to his partners in the effort, Melinda French Gates and her husband, Bill, Buffett foresaw something revolutionary.
“We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett said. “You hope to establish a new norm.”
One by one, the world’s richest people would be persuaded to commit more than half of their money to nonprofit causes. “In just a few short months we’ve made good progress,” Buffett said that December, as 17 more families joined in.
A week later, Buffett and the Gateses made their first of two visits with President Barack Obama to talk about the pledge in the Oval Office. They were back to the White House seven months later, when Obama lavished praise on the pledge in a 30-minute session with a few dozen signers, according to a person in the room.
In those heady times, it was unmistakably fashionable to sign the Giving Pledge. The project was born in an era when people including Gates epitomised a humanitarian culture that espoused both big capitalism and big philanthropy. Being seen as a good billionaire who gave back was important. Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Gates Foundation’s priorities — US education, global health and gender equality.
Now, it’s stylish, in a Silicon Valley contrarian sort of way, to bash the Giving Pledge.
Over the past two years, there has been a growing backlash from the billionaires who are its target donors. One of its first signers suggested he was “amending” his pledge to account for his for-profit ventures. Another signed it, and then in an occurrence without precedent, unsigned it.
No Oval Office visits anymore: President Donald Trump’s team describes the Pledge as almost a punchline. There’s even a quiet campaign by one pro-Trump tech billionaire to destroy it. Instead of signing up for nonpartisan philanthropy, some billionaires seeking impact are looking for a more direct route, spending more than ever on American elections.
The zeitgeist has changed very fast.
Aaron Horvath, a sociologist who has studied the Giving Pledge, called it a “time capsule” of that 2010 era. “It feels old school,” he said. Billionaires, he said, now think: “I can keep my head down and keep making money. I don’t have to put up with this charity charade anymore.”
This is an era of a more voracious capitalism, of billionaires trending right and getting ahead by embracing an administration that is happy to dole out favours. Many of today’s ascendant billionaires are dismissive of philanthropy as nothing more than public relations.
In this worldview, the real way to give back is via business success, to the redound of the US economy. Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses “are philanthropy.”
And that’s all to say nothing of how the public perception of one of the pledge’s figureheads, Bill Gates, has blown up over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That scandal led to his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021 and her ultimate exit from the foundation, which administers the pledge, in 2024. The Gates Foundation itself, meanwhile, is out of season in politics. Its causes, such as global health, have been attacked mercilessly by the Trump administration.
Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged about a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said. He has his own Epstein ties, but he calls the pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
John Arnold, a Houston billionaire who made money as an energy trader and was one of the earliest signers, said that what looks like tough times for the pledge are really just tough times for nonprofits.
“There was a backlash against a lot of charitable giving,” he said. “And the pledge kind of got swept up in that because it became synonymous with billionaire giving.”
The slowdown
The Giving Pledge did, as Buffett hoped, indeed establish something of a new “norm” in philanthropy. More than 250 families signed it, including those of Mike Bloomberg, Sam Altman and MacKenzie Scott. The pledge became a way for the uber-wealthy to announce they’d arrived.
Scott signed it in 2019, after her split from Jeff Bezos. A year later she began her enormous, rapid-fire philanthropic giving. Arnold is another of its most successful stories. Forbes estimated that he and his wife, Laura, have given away more than 40 per cent of their net worth to charity, almost all since signing it — and they’re only in their early 50s.
“In its early years, the Giving Pledge helped build norms where few existed,” said Taryn Jensen, who now runs the pledge. “Our goal is to keep building a culture where giving is the norm and to provide the support that helps turn commitment into action.”
But the rate of signers has plummeted in recent years. In the pledge’s first five years 113 people signed; 72 in the next five years; and just 43 in the next five, including a mere four signers in 2024. Last year was a relatively successful year by recent standards, with 14 signers, including Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Drew Houston of Dropbox.
“The value proposition has changed because the erosion of general trust, the polarisation of everything over the last years,” said Tom Tierney, who advises wealthy donors at Bridgespan, one of the nonprofit sector’s blue-chip advisory firms, and is on the board of the Gates Foundation. “You’re more likely to be criticised for giving large amounts of money away now than praised. That probably wasn’t as true 15 years ago,” he said, citing “contention” around extreme wealth.
Research published last year by left-wing critics of the pledge argued that very few signers were actually giving away their money at a fast enough rate to drive down their net worth. Most philanthropic donations went to intermediary organisations, they said, such as their own foundations, or happened en masse after they died, which technically satisfies the pledge.
Jensen said many signers “have already met their commitments or are steadily working toward them.”
Still, for someone on the right such as Thiel, there is a symbolic point to be made in his campaign against the pledge.
“They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” Thiel said, positing that some of the people who sign it now aren’t even billionaires. (The pledge says it is open to those whose net worth is under $US1 billion but “plan to give away at least $US500 million and are in a position to do so.“) “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”
Ron Conway, a venture capitalist signer who is close to Bill Gates, said comments like Thiel’s made little sense to him. Conway, who is active in Democratic politics, said the Giving Pledge had plenty of conservatives and moderates.
“Some people say that the Giving Pledge is aligned with liberal causes, or is woke, so to speak, and that couldn’t be the further from the truth,” he said.
Not all billionaires have turned away from giving, of course. “It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless,” wrote Dario Amodei, a co-founder of Anthropic, in a January essay.
And yet, befitting the times, even Amodei, 43, hasn’t signed the pledge himself. Anthropic has ties to the so-called effective altruist movement, which prioritises charity but is also far more concerned than the Giving Pledge is with whether that charity is effective.
Melinda French Gates recently presented the pledge’s success as somewhat qualified. (Gates and French Gates declined requests for interviews.) She told Wired in December that some signers have been giving money at a “massive scale,” but many others had not. “Some are doing it, and some are trying or aren’t ready to,” she said.
“I wish we had been even more successful with the pledge than we have been to date,” she said. “It’s a problem to continue working on.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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