Bill Gates recently announced he would give away virtually all his wealth, over $200 billion, by 2045. Gates has long been known for large-scale good deeds that secured him a unique position among modern billionaires. Journalists routinely skewer philanthropic efforts of the ultra-wealthy as self-serving tax schemes, but Gates—with his near-eradication of polio and efforts to halve global infant mortality—has occasionally drawn genuine praise.
His renewed goals for the next 20 years read like humanity’s moonshot checklist: eliminate deadly diseases, end preventable child mortality, eradicate poverty itself. It should have catapulted Gates straight into secular sainthood. But that didn’t happen. The world met his new pledge with familiar awe—especially as the U.S. administration slashed foreign aid funding and Gates stepped in to fill the gap—but also with restraint. Maybe that moderate-at-best optimism reflects the strange moment we’re living in and the deep skepticism we’ve developed as a society toward billionaire philanthropy. After all, the same month Gates announced his give-it-all-away plan, headlines showed the wealthiest growing even richer while most of the world continued to struggle.
According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost an estimated $175 billion per year—less than half the amount America’s ten richest individuals gained in personal wealth in 2023 alone. This contrast brings back a familiar, unresolved question: If today’s billionaires give so much, why isn’t the world more equal? Why, with all the foundations, endowments and nods to Andrew Carnegie’s claim that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” do the rich keep getting richer? And what is this modern ultra-wealthy pursuit of doing good really about? The answer might lie in the language of modern billionaire virtue. This rarefied club doesn’t talk about charity so much as about impact: Success isn’t measured in millions helped but in the scale of transformation promised.
“Philanthropy is always an expression of power,” writer Paul Vallely observed. Today’s billionaires compete not just for profit but for moral authority. When they write those big checks, they’re not speaking to the public. They’re speaking to each other and to history. It’s a kind of high-stakes virtue signaling where the scoreboard is legacy, and the metrics are often conveniently unmeasurable.
There’s nothing new in this approach to virtue through wealth—but the scale and ambition have changed. Where the Gilded Age titans built libraries and concert halls, today’s billionaires speak of “solving” malaria, “disrupting” poverty, “revolutionizing” education. Their language borrows from Silicon Valley pitch decks because that’s what it is: venture philanthropy, where social problems become market opportunities and donors remain CEOs of their conscience.
Such ambitions go beyond mere charity. When today’s philanthropists talk about ending poverty or eliminating diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, they’re positioning themselves beyond the constraints of mortality. That’s how philanthropy becomes a gesture of transcendence. Maybe that’s why the focus has always been on “not dying rich”—but who said anything about not getting richer while alive?
Chuck Feeney, the duty-free shopping magnate who actually gave away nearly all of his $8 billion fortune before dying, is the exception that proves the rule. His motto, “giving while living,” inspired Gates. But among the more than 240 Giving Pledge signatories who control $600 billion, Feeney’s radical divestment remains virtually unreplicated. Most prefer what critics call “philanthropic warehousing”—maintaining control while claiming virtue. In Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas goes further, calling them “the philanthropic plutocrats who believe they are helping but are actually making things worse.” The numbers support his critique: in the U.K., in the 10-year period to 2017, more than two-thirds of all millionaire donations went to higher education, with half going to just Oxford and Cambridge—the very institutions that mint the next generation of philanthropists.
This self-reinforcing cycle plays out globally: charitable giving has never been higher, yet wealth inequality continues to break records. The mechanisms of modern philanthropy tell why. Jeff Bezos pledged $10 billion for climate change, but has disclosed just over $2 billion in lifetime giving so far, raising concerns about the timeliness and transparency of his efforts. Elon Musk, worth $245 billion, has given roughly $500 million—a fraction of a percent—mostly funneled through his own foundation. Mark Zuckerberg created not a traditional foundation but a for-profit company, allowing him to direct funds to startups and political causes while still claiming philanthropic credit.
Seven of the top 10 charitable recipients in 2021 were donor-advised funds (DAFs) — essentially investment accounts with tax benefits. According to Inside Philanthropy, there’s an entire “wealth defense industry”—a network of tax attorneys, accountants and wealth managers who manipulate philanthropy through DAFs and private foundations to preserve their clients’ control more than maximize charitable impact. The credibility of even idealistic frameworks has eroded—nowhere more dramatically than in the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, whose high-profile embrace of effective altruism collapsed alongside revelations of massive fraud, leaving the movement itself under scrutiny.
Yet in this landscape of manufactured legacy and tax-optimized control, a few billionaires have chosen a different path. Since her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott has given away $14 billion with rare transparency and zero strings attached—no naming rights, no board seats, no elaborate applications. Melinda French Gates, after her own divorce, has similarly pivoted toward trust-based giving, committing $12.5 billion to advance women’s rights globally without the bureaucratic overhead that characterizes most large foundations. There was also the late David Gelbaum, green technology investor and philanthropist, who funneled billions through anonymous trusts; and other anonymous mega-donors, whose identities are yet to be exposed.
Even more striking is the contrast offered by those who’ve rejected the naming game entirely—including, ironically, the world’s biggest philanthropist by numbers, Warren Buffett. He provides nearly half the funding for Gates’s foundation, supports his children’s initiatives and runs a foundation named not for himself but for his late wife, Susan Thompson. Still, his low-profile approach raises the bar extraordinarily high for those who have yet to join the Big Givers Club—the new generation of ultra-wealthy.
As younger generations are usually perceived as more self-aware and idealistic overall, “Zillennial” billionaires are also expected to spread their wealth for good in greater volumes. Interestingly, the top 10 tech billionaires under 40—from Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang to Telegram’s Pavel Durov—none have signed the Giving Pledge or made any personal altruistic pledges of significance. Only Snap’s Evan Spiegel shows considerable philanthropic activity.
The explanation may be simple—and generational. Never before have entrepreneurs become this wealthy this young. Venture capital has compressed the timeline from startup to stratosphere. Many of these billionaires, still in their twenties and thirties, haven’t had their fortunes long enough to feel finished accumulating. As Ecclesiastes notes, there’s “a time to gather stones and a time to cast them away.” They’re still gathering while Gates, approaching 70, is scattering.
But if today’s philanthropists claim to cure the world, what could possibly be left for those who follow? In our world, everything grows—revenues, companies, ambitions and problems. The next generation hasn’t yet entered the big giving game, but when they do, what will they need to stake to outdo their predecessors? Discovering new worlds? Decoding consciousness itself? Finally answering the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything? The uncomfortable truth is that in the impact Olympics, the bar keeps rising. Today’s moonshots become tomorrow’s baseline. But while billionaires compete to cure the world, their wealth multiples faster than their giving.
