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In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge<\/a>: a public commitment, open to the world\u2019s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. \u201cWe\u2019re talking trillions over time,\u201d Buffett told Charlie Rose<\/a> that year. The trillions materialized. The giving, less so.<\/p>\n The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined \u2014 the highest concentration<\/a> the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide don\u2019t regularly have enough to eat.<\/p>\n This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor \u2014 or walk away from \u2014 a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.<\/p>\n The Giving Pledge\u2019s numbers, reported Sunday <\/a>by the New York Times, trace a steady decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 over the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in all of 2024. The roster includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk \u2014 some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in Peter Thiel\u2019s words to the Times, it is a club that\u2019s \u201creally run out of energy . . .I don\u2019t know if the branding is outright negative,\u201d Thiel told the outlet, \u201cbut it feels way less important for people to join.\u201d<\/p>\n The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been wearing thin for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d was so relentless in mocking the industry \u2014 its characters forever insisting they were \u201cmaking the world a better place\u201d while chasing valuations \u2014 that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show\u2019s writers, Clay Tarver, told The New Yorker<\/a> that year: \u201cI\u2019ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying \u2018We\u2019re making the world a better place,\u2019 specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.\u201d<\/p>\n It was an hilarious joke. The trouble is the idealism being satirized was also, at least partly, real \u2014 and what replaced it isn\u2019t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same piece, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really going for. Judge\u2019s answer: \u201cI think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.\u201d <\/p>\n McNamee\u2019s own read on things was less diplomatic: \u201cSome of us actually, as na\u00efve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> A decade later, the libertarians McNamee was describing have moved well beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.<\/p>\n Not everyone agrees on what \u201cgiving back\u201d even means. To the libertarian wing of tech \u2014 and it\u2019s an increasingly significant wing \u2014 the entire framework is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top of them is, at best, a social convention and, at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.<\/p>\n Few figures captures the current mood quite like Thiel, who, notably, never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he has reportedly called Gates an \u201cawful, awful person<\/a>\u201c). In fact, Thiel tells the Times he has privately encouraged around a dozen signers to undo their commitments and has even gently pushed those already wavering to make their exits official. \u201cMost of the ones I\u2019ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,\u201d Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an \u201cEpstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.\u201d <\/p>\n He has urged Musk to unsign, for example, arguing his money would otherwise go \u201cto left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by\u201d Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note. <\/p>\n But Thiel also told the Times something worth a harder look: that those who stay on the Pledge\u2019s public roster feel \u201csort of blackmailed\u201d \u2014 too exposed to public opinion to formally renounce a non-binding promise to give away vast sums of money.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a claim that\u2019s difficult to square with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point, a majority of Americans<\/a> already view him unfavorably. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech exec has endured and came out the other side more sure of himself, not less. <\/p>\n A different picture is meanwhile taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic necessities \u2014 rent, groceries, housing, fuel \u2014 surged 17% last year. \u201cWork,\u201d \u201chome,\u201d \u201cfood,\u201d \u201cbill,\u201d and \u201ccare\u201d were among the top keywords in campaigns that year. When the 43-day federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution this past fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. \u201cLife is getting more expensive and folks are struggling,\u201d the company\u2019s CEO told CBS News, \u201cso they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help them through.\u201d <\/p>\n Whether these trends are connected to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is a matter of debate, but they\u2019re happening at the same time, and the timing is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the wealthiest people in tech are still giving; they\u2019re just doing it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward their own chosen ends. At the start of 2026, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs \u2014 8% of its workforce \u2014 as part of a move away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating across several cities. \u201cBiohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,\u201d Zuckerberg said last November. <\/p>\n The CZI cuts look, at least on paper, less like the couple is retreating from philanthropy than recalibrating their approach. The Zuckerbergs have, after all, committed through the Pledge to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.<\/p>\n Not everyone is redefining the terms, either. Gates announced last year that he\u2019d give away virtually all his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades \u2014 more than $200 billion \u2014 with the foundation closing permanently on December 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie\u2019s old line that \u201cthe man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,\u201d he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.<\/p>\n It\u2019s happened before, this standoff between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth concentrated at anything like these levels \u2014 the original Gilded Age, the 1890s through the early 1900s \u2014 the correction didn\u2019t come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. It arrived as policy that was driven by political pressure too powerful to be ignored. The institutions that forced that correction \u2014 a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state \u2014 look considerably different today.<\/p>\n What isn\u2019t in dispute is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built in years, not generations, at the same moment the safety net is being cut. The wealth gained by the world\u2019s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam\u2019s 2026 global inequality report<\/a>. <\/p>\n The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the start, just a \u201cmoral pledge\u201d \u2014 no enforcement, no consequences, no one to answer to but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now frames staying on the list as a form of coercion \u2014 and that the Times found that argument worth reporting at length \u2014 says something about the one we\u2019re in right now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n