In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a simple disarmament campaign. To give bail: a public obligation open to the world’s wealthiest people to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to demand it. Technology has minted billionaires faster than any other industry in history, and the question of how these riches will affect society is just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett Charlie Rose said that year. Trillions realized. Giving, less.
The numbers no longer shock anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now own the combined wealth of the bottom 90%. the highest concentration The Federal Reserve has been recording the wealth distribution since 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has increased by 81% since 2020 to $18.3 trillion, while one in four people in the world do not eat enough on a regular basis.
It’s a world in which a small group of extraordinarily rich people debate whether to keep or walk away from a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they own.
Giving Pledge numbers, reported on Sunday By the New York Times, watch a steady decline. In the first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 in the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in all of 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, as Peter Thiel told the Times, the club is “really draining if I know the brand is draining.” “But it feels less important that people join,” Thiel said.
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been out of date for years. Back in 2016, HBO’s “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry — its characters always insisted they were “making the world a better place” while chasing prices — that it changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, This was reported by The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that PR departments at some big companies have told their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ especially since we’ve been mocking that phrase mercilessly.”
It was a funny joke. The problem is that the idealism being satirized was at least partly real – and its replacement isn’t so funny. In the same piece, veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalled asking Silicon Valley founder Mike Judge what he was really going for. Judge’s response: “I think Silicon Valley is engaged in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s reading was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually came here to make the world a better place, as naive as it sounds. And we failed. We made some things better, some things worse, and meanwhile the libertarians took over and they don’t care about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
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Ten years later, the libertarians McNamee describes have expanded far beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet of Ministers.
Not everyone understands what “return” means. To the libertarian wing of tech — and it’s an increasingly important wing — the whole frame is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and spurring innovation are real contributions, and the pressure to place philanthropy on top of them is, at best, social convention and at worst, virtue-jerking.
Some figures reflect the current mood, notably Thiel, who never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he called Gates “horrible, horrible person“). In fact, Thiel tells the Times, he’s encouraged nearly as many signers to commit, and even gently nudged those who were already hesitant to make their exits official. “Most of the people I’ve talked to have at least regretted signing it,” he said.
He urged Musk to sign on, claiming, for example, that his money would go to left-wing nonprofits that would otherwise be co-opted by Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory letter.
But Thiel told the Times something worth taking a closer look at: Those who remain on the Pledge’s public list feel “blackmailed” — too exposed to public opinion to formally renege on a nonbinding pledge to give large sums of money.
It’s a claim that Thiel has in mind that hardly compares to the public behavior of some people. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point, a the majority of Americans already looks at him negatively. Zuckerberg has faced the most sustained regulation and public hostility any tech professional has endured in almost a decade, and has become more confident in the other side, not less.
Meanwhile, a different picture is forming on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic needs — rent, food, housing, fuel — grew 17% last year. “Work”, “house”, “food”, “account” and “care” were among the main keywords in the campaigns that year. When a 43-day federal shutdown halted the distribution of food stamps last fall, related campaigns grew sixfold. “Life is getting more expensive and people are struggling,” the company’s CEO told CBS News, “so they’re reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help them.”
Whether these trends are related to the decisions made by charity boards is debatable, but they are happening simultaneously and the timing is hard to ignore.
It is worth distinguishing the fate of the pledge more widely than the fate of charity. Some of the richest people in tech are still giving away; they do so only on their own terms, with their own means of transport, to their own chosen ends. In early 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut about 70 jobs — 8% of its workforce — as part of a move away from education and social justice toward the Biohub network, a multi-city group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes. Last November, Zuckerberg said, “Biohub will be a major focus of our philanthropy going forward.”
The CZI cuts appear, at least on paper, to be a retreat from philanthropy rather than a re-evaluation of the couple’s approach. The Zuckerbergs have finally committed to giving away 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes.
Not everyone redefines terms. Last year, Gates announced that he would give away nearly all of his remaining fortune — more than $200 billion — over the next two decades through the Gates Foundation. The Foundation will close permanently on December 31, 2045. Recalling the words of Carnegie, “the man who dies so rich will be disgraced”, he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.
This conflict between concentrated wealth and everyone has happened before. The last time wealth was concentrated at these levels—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 finally the New Deal. It came as a policy driven by political pressure too strong to be ignored. The institutions that forced this amendment—a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state—look much different today.
What is not in dispute is the speed of change. These fortunes have been built over years, not generations, while the safety net is being cut. Oxfam estimates that the wealth of the world’s billionaires alone in 2025 would be enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave the billionaires wealthier than $500 billion. 2026 global inequality report.
The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett put it from the beginning, just a “moral pledge” – no execution, no results, no one to answer to but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that created it. That Thiel now frames remaining on the list as a form of coercion — and the Times found that argument worth reporting at length — says something about what we’re in right now.
