In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign targeting the world’s richest people called Making a promise: a public commitment to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetime or after their death.
The year seemed to demand it. Technology was churning out billionaires faster than any industry in history in that decade, and the question of how those fortunes would affect society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett said Charlie Rose in 2010. The trillions materialized. the giving, not so much.
The numbers no longer surprise anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now own about as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined—the higher concentration The Federal Reserve has been recording since it began tracking the distribution of wealth in 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has increased by 81% since 2020, reaching $18.3 trillion, even as one in four people worldwide do not regularly eat enough.
This is the world in which a small group of extremely wealthy people debate whether to honor—or walk away from—a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.
The numbers of The Giving Pledge, reported on Sunday from the New York Times, show a steady 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 all of 2024.
The roster currently 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 New York Times, it’s a club that “is really lacking in energy.”
“I don’t know if the brand is completely negative, but it feels a lot less important for people to participate,” Thiel told the Times.
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The language of doing good has been worn out for years in Silicon Valley. In 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry — with characters constantly insisting they’re “making the world a better place” — that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior.
One of the series writers, Clay Tarver, he told the New Yorker that year: “I was told that, at some of the big companies, the public relations departments ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We make the world a better place,’ especially because we were mocked so mercilessly with that phrase.”
It was hilarious. But the idealism satirized was also partly real, and what replaced it isn’t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same piece, recalls asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he really wanted. The judge responded: “I think Silicon Valley is mired 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, naive as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we didn’t. We did some things better, we did them worse, and meanwhile the libertarians took over, and they don’t give a damn about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
A decade later, today the libertarians McNamee described are in the cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “return” even means. For the increasingly important libertarian wing of tech, the whole framework is wrong: building companies, creating jobs and promoting innovation are the real contributions, and the push to put philanthropy at the top is, at best, a social contract. at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.
Few figures capture the current mood like Thiel, who has never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (he has reportedly called Gates “awful, awful personIn fact, Thiel tells the Times that he has privately encouraged about a dozen signatories to reverse their pledges and has even gently nudged those who are already wavering to formalize their withdrawals.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
He urged Musk to unsubscribe, for example, arguing that his money would otherwise go “to left-wing nonprofits of Gates’ choosing. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without any public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note.
But Thiel also told the Times something worth taking a closer look at: Those who remain on the Pledge’s public roster feel “kind of blackmailed” — too exposed to public opinion to formally renege on a nonbinding pledge to give huge sums of money.
It’s a claim that’s hard to square with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing his public image and at this point, a majority of Americans already views him unfavorably. Zuckerberg has spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech executive has endured, and he’s come out the other side more confident, not less.
Meanwhile, a different picture is taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic necessities — rent, groceries, housing, fuel — grew 17 percent last year, with top keywords in campaigns including “job,” “home,” “food,” “bill” and “care.”
And when a 43-day federal shutdown halted the distribution of food cartons last fall, related campaigns multiplied 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.”
Whether these trends are linked to decisions made in charity boardrooms is up for debate, but the coincidence is hard to ignore.
It is worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of charity more broadly. Some of the richest people in tech are still giving. They just do it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, 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 shift away from education and social justice causes and prioritizing the Biohub network, a group of nonprofit biology-focused research institutes operating in several cities. “Biohub will be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI cuts look, on paper at least, less like the pair pulling back from philanthropy than recalibrating their approach. The Zuckerbergs have, after all, committed to giving away 99% of their lifetime wealth through the pledge.
Not everyone is redefining the terms either. Gates said last year that he would give away nearly all of his fortune — more than $200 billion — through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades, and the foundation would close for good on Dec. 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies rich dies ashamed,” he wrote that he was not determined to be rich.
This confrontation between concentrated wealth and everyone else is not new. Wealth was last concentrated at such levels during the original Gilded Age, the 1890s to early 1900s, and the correction did not come from philanthropists. It came from the collapse of trust, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and finally the New Deal. It arrived as a policy driven by political pressure too strong to ignore. The institutions that enforced this correction—a functioning Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state—look very different today.
What is not in doubt is the pace of change. These fortunes were built over years, not generations, while the safety net was being cut. The wealth acquired by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would be enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave the richest more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam. Global Inequality Report 2026.
The Giving Pledge has always been, as Buffett said from the beginning, just a “moral promise”: no enforcement, no consequence, no one to answer to but yourself. That it once held weight says something about the era in which it was produced.
The fact that Thiel now sees staying on the list as a form of coercion — and that the Times found that argument worth reporting at length — says something about where we are right now.
