Billionaires made a promise, now some want out

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a surprisingly simple campaign they called the give promise: a public commitment, open to the world’s richest people, to donate more than half of their fortune during their lifetime or upon death. The moment seemed to demand it. Technology was generating billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking billions over time,” Buffett he told charlie rose that year. The trillions materialized. Giving, less.

The numbers no longer surprise anyone paying attention. The richest 1% of American households now own approximately as much wealth as the poorest 90% combined; highest concentration has recorded by the Federal Reserve since it began tracking the distribution of wealth in 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people around the world do not have enough to eat regularly.

This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor or abandon a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.

The Giving Pledge numbers, reported on sunday According to the New York Times, they are registering a constant decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Commitment. Then 72 in the next five, 43 in the next five and just four in all of 2024. The list includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Elon Musk, some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in the words of Peter Thiel to the Times, it is a club that has “really run out of steam… I don’t know if the brand is completely negative,” Thiel told the outlet. “But it seems much less important that people join.”

The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been fraying for years. In 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry (its characters always insisted they were “making the world a better place” while chasing valuations) that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, he told the New Yorker that year: “I’m told that at some big companies, public relations departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we’ve mocked that phrase so mercilessly.”

It was a hilarious joke. The problem is that the idealism being satirized was also, at least in part, real, and what replaced it isn’t as funny. Veteran technology investor Roger McNamee, in the same article, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really looking for. Judge’s response: “I believe Silicon Valley is engaged in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of Steve Jobs’ generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values ​​of Peter Thiel’s generation.”

McNamee’s own reading of things was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we didn’t succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and meanwhile the libertarians took power, and they don’t give a damn about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”

A decade later, the libertarians McNamee described have gone far beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.

Not everyone agrees on what it means to “give back.” For the tech libertarian wing – and it is an increasingly important wing – the whole framework is wrong. Building businesses, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on them is at best a social convention and at worst extortion disguised as virtue.

Few figures capture the current mood better than Thiel, who, notably, never signed the Pledge and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he has reportedly called Gates a “horrible, horrible person“). In fact, Thiel tells the Times that he has privately encouraged about a dozen signers to undo their commitments and has even gently pressured those who were already hesitant to make their departures official. “Most of the ones I’ve spoken to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge a “fake Epstein-adjacent Boomer club.”

He has urged Musk to cancel his contract, for example, arguing that otherwise his money would go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong let his letter quietly disappear from 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 worth taking a closer look: that those who remain on Pledge’s public list feel “somewhat blackmailed,” too exposed to public opinion to formally renounce a nonbinding promise to donate large sums of money.

It’s a difficult statement 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, at this point, a majority of americans I already see it unfavorably. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech executive has ever endured and came out the other side more confident, not less.

Meanwhile, a different picture is emerging on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraising for basic needs (rent, groceries, housing, fuel) increased 17% last year. “Work”, “home”, “food”, “bill” and “care” were among the main keywords in that year’s campaigns. When the 43-day federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution last fall, related campaigns increased six-fold. “Life is getting more expensive and people are struggling,” the company’s CEO told CBS News, “so they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help.”

Whether these trends are related to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is a matter of debate, but they are happening at the same time and the momentum is hard to ignore.

It is worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the richest people in the technology sector continue to donate; They simply do it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward the ends they themselves have chosen. In early 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) eliminated about 70 jobs (8% of its workforce) as part of a shift away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of biology-focused nonprofit research institutes operating in several cities. “Biohub will be the primary focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.

CZI’s cuts seem, at least on paper, less a retreat by the couple from philanthropy than a recalibration of their approach. After all, the Zuckerbergs have committed through the Pledge to giving away 99% of their lifetime wealth.

Not everyone is redefining the terms either. Gates announced last year that he would donate virtually all of his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades (more than $200 billion) and that the foundation would close permanently on December 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies this rich dies dishonored,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.

It’s happened before, this showdown between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth was concentrated at similar levels (the original Gilded Age, from 1890 to the early 1900s), the correction did not come from philanthropists. It came from the destruction of trusts, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and finally, the New Deal. It came as a policy driven by political pressure too powerful to be ignored. The institutions that forced that correction—a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state—look considerably different today.

What is not in doubt is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built in years, not generations, while cutting the safety net. The wealth earned by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on the planet $250 and still leave the billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to the Oxfam report. Global Inequality Report 2026.

The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the beginning, simply a “moral promise”: no application, no consequences, no one to answer to but yourself. The fact that it once had weight says something about the era that produced it. The fact that Thiel now frames his stay on the list as a form of coercion (and that the Times found that argument worth reporting at length) says something about the situation we find ourselves in now.