What the Giving Pledge Really Gave Us
Most Giving Pledge dollars never reached the public, flowing instead to private foundations and donor-advised funds while billionaires grew richer, bought reputations for generosity, and handed back scraps to the people who made their fortunes. That’s philanthro-capitalism at work.
Fifteen years in, rich do-gooders’ Giving Pledge has delivered tax breaks and image management and left everyone else paying the price through starved public coffers.(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
In 2010, billionaires Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates launched The Giving Pledge. The idea was that the world’s wealthiest ought to give back to the world, so signatories promised to donate half their wealth. Over the years, the Pledge steadily collected new members, reaching more than 250 donors including Elon Musk (2012), Larry Ellison (2010), MacKenzie Scott (2019) — though not her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos — and Sam Altman (2024). And then what happened?
The pledge is a promise, not a contract — not a legally binding one, at least. Morally binding? Perhaps. But did it bind? Sort of. Not really. It depends on how you score it.
In July, the Institute for Policy Studies released a report, The Giving Pledge at 15, which tracked progress on donor promises. The authors characterized the initiative as “the largest and most visible public commitment that billionaires make, in community, to distributing their vast fortunes,” noting that 13 percent of American billionaires are signatories. More than a decade and a half in, the report suggests, the Pledge has yielded mixed results including “bold and direct Giving Pledgers” alongside “Pledgers who need to pick up the pace” and “Pledgers who cravenly intertwine personal benefit with their philanthropic obligations.” Ultimately, the IPS concludes, “the Pledge is unfulfilled, unfulfillable, and not our ticket to a fairer, better future.”
A Big, Unfulfilled Promise
The data bears out the IPS conclusion, but it’s even worse than that. The institute finds that of the original members of the pledge, thirty-two of them have enjoyed collective wealth growth of nearly 300 percent since signing on. “Only one couple in this group has fulfilled their commitment (Laura and John Arnold),” write the authors. From there, it doesn’t get much better.
“Of what we can track,” they continue,
seventy-nine percent of original Giving Pledgers’ charitable gifts have entered private foundations, garnering tax reductions immediately before all that donated wealth reaches working charities. Eight of the 22 deceased Pledgers fulfilled their pledges, giving away 50 percent or more of their wealth at death, either while they were living or in their estates. And if all the living 2010 Pledgers who are still billionaires fulfilled their pledges today, they would direct an additional $370 billion to charity.
That number seems astronomical, and it is. But as the IPS points out, the 110 American signers alone who are still billionaires share “a combined wealth of $1.7 trillion.” The scale of this wealth is gargantuan: $1.7 trillion is greater than the GDP of dozens upon dozens of countries including Turkey, with its eighty-five million people, Indonesia with two hundred and eighty-five million, and Saudi Arabia with thirty-six million. And lest anyone think these countries are drawn from the bottom of the GDP barrel, all three hold a spot in the world’s top twenty. A few good weeks in the stock market, and the top US billionaires could rival, or surpass, South Korea, Spain, and Mexico. Perhaps they already have.
When Giving Means Keeping
While the Pledge and its signatories have failed to live up to the showy standards they set for themselves — despite having basked in the glow of torches held up by fawning hangers-on for making the promise — many of them have nonetheless donated considerable sums. The IPS reports that the original signatories have donated roughly $206 billion. But the top-line number comes with an asterisk. Of that total, $169 billion — the vast majority — went to private foundations and donor-advised funds.
This approach to giving makes the donations far from unmitigated, goodness-of-one’s-heart gifts. Whatever else they may be, they’re strategic, reputation-polishing, tax-minimizing disbursements to charities almost certainly chosen to align with particular worldviews. These visions are shaped disproportionately by the very few whose wealth, and therefore power, eclipses that of the many — and many times over. Even in their most charitable mood, billionaires demand control, and exercise a perverse capacity to shape the world according to their vision of what is, or ought to be, good, just, true, right, necessary, or beautiful.
To critique this aggressively public, reputation-laundering, world-shaping, tax-managing philanthropy is not to say that the money they donate does no good. Of course it does. Donations vary in quantity, intent, and outcome, and many have provided much-needed funding to initiatives including public health, education, and environmental conservation. But that good comes at a cost. Ironies abound, not least among them the fact that tax policies effectively written by the rich have for decades starved public health, education, and environmental conservation efforts of the very funds they might otherwise receive from the state — funds that would be at least subject to nominally public and collective control.
The Philanthropy-Industrial Complex Lives!
The conceit of the Giving Pledge, at least as it’s acknowledged publicly, is that the richest among us can and should give something back because it’s the right thing to do. But the undertaking rests on a political, economic, and legal system that enables the creation and maintenance of a class of ultrawealthy capitalists who accumulate grotesquely disproportionate assets and then leverage them to shape the world in ways that reinforce their wealth — at great cost to the public, which is left with lower wages, worse working conditions, underfunded and neglected public institutions, and the mere shadow of a welfare state.
One might be forgiven, then, for asking what good a several times–removed, tax-deductible donation from a tech billionaire does for someone struggling to make ends meet within an economic system designed by and for that same billionaire to preserve their wealth and power.
It’s something beyond Galaxy Brain logic to suggest that people are too selfish for socialism and that unlimited personal wealth is the morally correct and legally necessary reflection of a natural order, born of the brilliance, hard work, and pluck of the self-made billionaire. Never mind that individual wealth is derived collectively — from workers, from the state, from infrastructure. Never mind that wealth is also, among these other contributors (and pardon the pun), a matter of good fortune.
As The Giving Pledge and the broader logic of philanthropy makes clear, the billionaire class has pulled off the greatest heist in human history. They have robbed the collective of trillions, returned a fraction of it with strings attached to support their own benefit, and been lauded as heroes by the very public they robbed. In essence, it is a modern version of noblesse oblige — the lords of capital handing back scraps to the very people whose labor produces their wealth, much as peasants once sustained aristocrats and royals who rewarded them with crumbs. Lest anyone think a socialist economic model is impossible, we should reflect on this: if the existence of philanthropy is not just possible, but upheld by so many as morally sound, then anything is possible.