Billionaires made a promise — and now some want out

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a simple campaign called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s richest people, to give away more than half their wealth during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Technology was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how these fortunes would impact society was only beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. Trillions have been achieved. Tender, less so.

The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The richest 1% of US households now own nearly as much wealth as 90% of households combined — the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has grown 81% since 2020, to $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide don’t get enough to eat on a regular basis.

This is a world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people debate whether to honor — or renege on — a voluntary, unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.

Giving pledge numbers, published by The New York Times on Sunday, indicate a steady decline. In the first five years, 113 families signed the pledge. Then 72 in the next five, 43 in the next five, and just four in 2024. The list includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk — some of the most powerful people in the world. However, in Peter Thiel’s words to the Times, the club has “really run out of energy… I don’t know if the brand is completely negative,” Thiel told the Times. “But it seems less important that people join the site.”

The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been weak for years. In 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in its mocking of the industry — its characters always insisting they “make the world a better place” while chasing ratings — that it changed the actual behavior of companies. “I’ve been told that at some major companies, public relations departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ precisely because we’ve ridiculed that phrase so mercilessly,” Clay Tarver, one of the show’s writers, told The New Yorker that year.

It was a funny joke. The problem is that the idealism that was mocked was also true, at least in part, and what replaced it was not funny. In the same article, veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalls asking Mike Judge, the founder of Silicon Valley, what he was really after. Judge’s answer: “I think Silicon Valley is locked in a huge battle between the hippie value system of Steve Jobs’ generation and the libertarian values ​​of the Ayn Randian generation of Peter Thiel’s generation.”

McNamee’s take was less diplomatic: “Some of us, as naive as it may seem, 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 in the meantime the liberals have taken over, and they don’t care what’s right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”

A decade later, the liberals described by McNamee have moved well beyond Silicon Valley. Some of them are now in the Cabinet.

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

There are few figures who capture the current mood as well as Thiel, who has never signed the pledge himself and is not a fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he is said to have called Gates “an absolutely terrible person”). In fact, Thiel tells the Times that he privately encouraged about a dozen signatories to back away from their commitments, and even gently nudged those already hesitant to make their exit official. “Most people I talked to at least expressed remorse for signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “the fake boom club next door to Epstein.”

He has urged Musk to cancel the signing, for example, arguing that his money would otherwise go “to left-wing nonprofits of his choosing” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his message disappear from Pledge’s website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory message.

But Thiel also told the Times something worth a closer look: that those who remain on the public pledge list feel “a kind of blackmail” — too exposed to public opinion to formally abandon a nonbinding promise to donate huge sums of money.

It’s a claim that’s difficult to reconcile with the general behavior of some of the people Thiel is considering. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point, the majority of Americans already view him negatively. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech executive has endured and came out on the other side more confident, not less.

Meanwhile, a different picture is shaping up on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraising for basic necessities — rent, groceries, housing, gas — was up 17% last year. “Work,” “home,” “food,” “bill,” and “care” were among the top campaign keywords that year. When a 43-day federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution last fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. “Life is becoming more expensive and people are struggling, so they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help,” the company’s CEO told CBS News.

Whether these trends are related to decisions made on charity boards is debatable, but they are happening at the same time, and the timing 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 tech are still donating; They do so only on their own terms, through their own vehicles, to achieve their chosen goals. At the beginning of 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs — 8% of its workforce — as part of a shift away from education and social justice issues toward the Biohub Network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating in several cities. “Biohub will be a major focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.

The CZ cuts, at least on paper, look less like the couple’s retreat from philanthropy and more like a recalibration of their approach. The Zuckerberg family has committed, through a pledge, to give away 99% of its wealth during its lifetime.

Not everyone is redefining terms either. Gates announced last year that he would give away almost all of his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades — more than $200 billion — with the foundation permanently closing on December 31, 2045. Drawing on the old Carnegie phrase that “the man who dies rich dies in shame,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.

It’s happened before, this confrontation between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth was concentrated at anything like this — the original Gilded Age, from the 1890s to the early 1900s — the correction did not come from philanthropists. It came from the breach of trust, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. This policy arrived as a policy that was driven by political pressures too strong to ignore. The institutions that imposed this correction – an effective Congress, a free press, and an empowered regulatory state – look very different today.

What is not in dispute is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built over years, not generations, at the very moment the safety net is cut. The wealth acquired by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on Earth $250, yet it would leave the billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam’s 2026 Global Inequality Report.

The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the beginning, just a “moral pledge” — no enforcement, no consequences, and no one to answer to but yourself. That it once held weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now portrays remaining on the list as a form of coercion — and that the Times found this argument worth publishing at length — says something about where we are now.