In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign to get the wealthiest people on the planet to publicly commit to giving away most of their money. It seemed like the moment called for it. The technology industry was producing billionaires faster than any other industry in history, and the question of how that wealth would impact society was just beginning to take shape. That same year, Buffett told Charlie Rose, “We’re talking trillions of dollars over the long term.” Trillions of things have materialized. Donations not so much.
This number is no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined, the highest concentration since the Federal Reserve began tracking the distribution of wealth in 1989. The wealth of the world’s billionaires has increased by 81% since 2020 to reach a whopping $18.3 trillion, yet one in four people around the world don’t have enough to eat on a regular basis.
This is a world in which a small number of extremely wealthy people are debating whether to keep or abandon a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of their wealth.
The Giving Pledge numbers, reported by The New York Times on Sunday, have been steadily declining. In the first five years, 113 families signed the pledge. Then 72 in the next five years, 43 in the five years after that, and just 4 in all of 2024. The roster includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk, some of the most influential people in the world, but in Peter Thiel’s words to the Times, the club is “really running out of energy…I’m not sure the branding is entirely negative.” “But I feel like it’s less important that people participate,” Thiel told the outlet.
The term “doing good” has faded in Silicon Valley over the years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” reportedly mercilessly mocked the industry, changing how companies actually behave as its characters chased valuations and forever claimed they were “making the world a better place.” Clay Tarver, one of the show’s writers, told The New Yorker in the same year: “I’ve heard that public relations departments at some large companies have ordered employees to stop saying, ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ especially because we’ve been making fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was a funny joke. The problem is that the idealism being satirized is also, at least in part, reality, and what replaces it isn’t nearly as interesting. In the same article, veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he really wanted to do. The judge’s answer: “I think Silicon Valley is in an epic battle between the hippie values of Steve Jobs’ generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of Peter Thiel’s generation.”
“It may sound naive, but the truth is that some of us came here to make the world a better place. And we didn’t succeed. We made some things better and made some things worse. And in the meantime, the liberals took over. They don’t care about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
tech crunch event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
Ten years later, the libertarians McNamee was describing have moved far beyond Silicon Valley. Some are currently in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” means. For the tech liberal school, and it is an increasingly important school, the whole framework is wrong. The pressure to layer philanthropy on top of the real contribution of building businesses, creating jobs, and driving innovation is at best a social convention, and at worst a shakedown disguised as virtue.
Few people capture the current mood better than Thiel, who himself has never signed the pledge and is no fan of Bill Gates (notably, he reportedly called Gates a “terrible, awful person”). In fact, Thiel told the Times that he privately encouraged about a dozen signatories to abandon their pledges and gently nudged those who were already on the fence to formally leave. “Most of the people I talked to expressed at least some regret for signing,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “an Epstein-adjacent fake boomer club.”
For example, he urged Musk to unsign, claiming that otherwise his funds would go to “left-wing nonprofits chosen by Gates.” When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly removed his letter from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without any public explanation, Thiel congratulated him.
But Thiel also told the Times that it’s worth a closer look. Those who remain on the Pledge’s public list feel “under some sort of intimidation” and are too exposed to public opinion to formally relinquish their non-binding commitment to provide large sums of money.
This is a difficult claim to reconcile with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and a majority of Americans already view him negatively at this point. Mr. Zuckerberg has gained confidence in himself after nearly a decade of dealing with some of the most sustained regulation and public hostility a tech executive has ever endured.
Meanwhile, on the ground, a different image is taking shape. GoFundMe reports that fundraising for basic necessities like rent, food, housing, and fuel has spiked 17% in the last year. “Work,” “home,” “meals,” “bills,” and “care” were among the top keywords in that year’s campaigns. This fall, when the 43-day federal government shutdown halted food stamp distribution, related campaigns spiked sixfold. “The cost of living is getting higher and higher and people are struggling,” the company’s CEO told CBS News. “That’s why we’re reaching out to friends and family to help them get through this.”
Whether these trends are related to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is debatable, but they are occurring simultaneously and their timing is difficult to ignore.
It is worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of broader philanthropy. Some of the wealthiest people in the tech industry still donate. They are simply doing it of their own volition, through their own means, towards their chosen ends. In early 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut approximately 70 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, as part of its transition away from education and social justice causes to the BioHub Network, a group of non-profit biology-focused research institutions operating in multiple cities. “Biohub will be a major focus of our philanthropic efforts going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI cuts appear, at least on paper, to be more like the couple recalibrating their approach than a retreat from philanthropy. After all, the Zuckerbergs made a promise through their pledge to give away 99% of their wealth during their lifetime.
Not everyone is redefining terms either. Last year, Gates announced that he would give away virtually all of his remaining fortune (more than $200 billion) over the next 20 years through the Gates Foundation, which would close permanently on December 31, 2045. Gates wrote that he was determined not to die rich, quoting Carnegie’s old line: “He who dies so rich dies in shame.”
Conflicts between concentrated wealth and other people have occurred before. The last time wealth was concentrated to such a level, during the first Gilded Age, from the 1890s to the early 1900s, the fix was not brought about by philanthropists. It came from trust destruction, federal income taxes, inheritance taxes, and ultimately the New Deal. It emerged as a policy driven by political pressures too strong to ignore. The institutions that forced that correction—a functioning parliament, a free press, and an empowered regulatory state—look quite different today.
What is not up for debate is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built over years, not generations, at the same time that safety nets are being reduced. According to Oxfam’s 2026 Global Inequality Report, the wealth earned by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would be enough to give every person on the planet $250, yet billionaires would still be over $500 billion richer.
As Buffett has said from the beginning, the Giving Pledge has always been a “moral pledge” with no enforcement, no consequences, and no one to answer to but yourself. The fact that it once had a sense of weight says something about the era in which it was created. That Mr. Thiel now views remaining on the list as a form of coercion, and that the Times found the debate worth reporting in detail, says something about the situation we find ourselves in.
Source link
