In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched an irreverently simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s richest people, to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetime or upon death. The moment seemed to call. Tech was producing billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how that fortune would affect society was just emerging. “We’re talking billions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. Billions have happened. Giving, little.
The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone who pays attention. The top 1% of American households now hold nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined — the highest amount the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking the distribution of wealth in 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has grown by 81% since 2020, reaching $18.3 trillion, while one in four people around the world do not have enough to eat.
This is a world where a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor – or walk away from – a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away a portion of their possessions.
The Giving Pledge numbers, reported Sunday by the New York Times, track a gradual decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 in the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in 2024. The list includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk – some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in the words of Peter Thiel in the Times, a club that “really loses power.” coming out, “but it feels less important for people to join.”
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been evolving for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was relentless in mocking the industry – its characters forever insisting that they “make the world a better place” while chasing ratings – until it reportedly changed the company’s actual behavior. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, told the New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that, at some of the biggest companies, PR departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ mainly because we’ve made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was a funny joke. The problem is that idealism is filled and, at least in part, was real – and what took its place is not so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same episode, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really up to. Judge’s response: “I think Silicon Valley is mired in a great battle between the hippie value system of Steve Jobs’ generation and the Ayn Randian liberal values of Peter Thiel’s generation.”
McNamee’s own reading of things was not diplomatic: “Some of us actually, as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we didn’t succeed. We made some things better, they made other things worse, and now the libertarians are taking over, and they don’t give a damn about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Ten years later, the libertarians McNamee described have moved beyond Silicon Valley. Some are in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “recovery” means. In the libertarian wing of tech — and it’s an increasingly important wing — the whole frame is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and creating new things are real contributions, and the pressure to impose compassion on them is, at best, a social convention, and at worst, a shakedown dressed up as beauty.
Few figures capture the current situation like Thiel, who has never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he reportedly called Gates a “bad, bad guy”). In fact, Thiel tells the Times that he has privately encouraged a dozen signatories to back off their commitments and has even gently nudged already reluctant ones to make their withdrawals official. “Most of those I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “a Boomer club next to Epstein, fake.”
He urged Musk to stop signing, for example, saying his money would go to a “left-wing nonprofit that would be chosen by” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly released his letter on the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note.
But Thiel also told the Times something that deserves a closer look: that those who sit on the public list of the Pledge feel “embarrassed” — too exposed in the public eye to officially abandon a non-binding promise to release large sums of money.
It’s a claim that’s hard to reconcile with the social behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public opinion, and by now, most Americans already view him negatively. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the toughest regulation and public hostility any tech boss has endured and came out the other side more confident in himself, not less.
A different picture unfolds below. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic needs — rent, groceries, housing, gas — rose 17% last year. “Work,” “home,” “food,” “debt,” and “care” were among the top keywords in that year’s campaigns. When a 43-day federal shutdown halted the distribution of food stamps this past fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. “Life is expensive and people are struggling,” a company executive told CBS News, “so they’re trying to reach out to friends and family to see if they can help.”
Whether these trends are connected to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is up for debate, but they are happening at the same time, and the timing is hard to ignore.
It is worth distinguishing the end of the Promise from the end of philanthropy in general. Some of the richest people in technology are still here; they do it as they like, with their own cars, according to their chosen goals. At the beginning of 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs – 8% of its employees – as part of a shift from education and social justice to its Biohub network, a group of non-profit institutions, focused on biological sciences that work across several cities. “Biohub will be very focused on helping us move forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
CZI’s cuts look, at least on paper, like the couple withdrawing from helping people rather than revising their approach. The Zuckerbergs, after all, have pledged to give away 99% of their wealth for life.
Not everyone is redefining terms, either. Gates announced last year that he would give away all of his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next twenty years – more than $200 billion – with the foundation closing forever on December 31, 2045. Using Carnegie’s old line that “he who dies rich dies disgraced,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.
It has happened before, this disagreement between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth was concentrated at anything like these levels — the First Mature Period, 1890s to early 1900s — the fix didn’t come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and finally the New Deal. It became a policy driven by political pressure too strong to ignore. The institutions that forced that reform — an active Congress, a free press, a powerful regulatory regime — look very different today.
What is not disputed is the pace of change. These fortunes are built over years, not generations, at the same time the safety net is cut. The wealth gained by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give everyone in the world $250 and still leave the billionaires wealthier than 500 billion, according to Oxfam’s 2026 global inequality report.
The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said in the beginning, just a “moral promise” – no coercion, no consequences, no one to answer to but you. That it once carried weight means something at the time it was produced. That Thiel now advocates staying on the list as a means of enforcement — and that the Times has found the controversy worth reporting for a long time — says something about where we’re at right now.
