Billions pledged — now others want it

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a simple mockery campaign they called Making a Promise: a public offering, open to the world’s richest people, to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to be calling. Tech was making billions faster than any industry in history, and the question of how that economy would affect people was just beginning. “We’re talking billions over time,” Buffett he told Charlie Rose That year. Trillions happened. To give, less.

These numbers are no longer surprising to anyone who is interested. The top 1% of American households now own as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined – Great stability The Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, wealth has grown 81% since 2020, to $18.3 trillion, while one in four people in the world do not have enough to eat.

This is a world where a small group of super-rich people are now debating whether to honor – or walk away from – a solemn and impossible promise to give away half of what they have.

Numbers for The Giving Pledge, report on Sunday and the New York Times, check the slow decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 in the next five years, 43 in the next five, and only 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, however, in the words of Peter Thiel in the Times, it is a club that is “really disappearing if I don’t know how to rent, “but it feels like it is unnecessary for people to join.”

The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been low for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in its mockery of the industry – the characters insist that they are “making the world a better place” as they chase calculations – that it has changed the very nature of the industry. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, he told The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that, in some big companies, PR departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ mostly because we’ve laughed at that phrase so mercilessly.”

It was a funny joke. The problem is that the sentiment being abused was also, perhaps, real – and what replaced it is not funny. Veteran tech entrepreneur Roger McNamee, on the same episode, recalled asking Silicon Valley developer Mike Judge what he wanted. Judge’s answer: “I think that Silicon Valley is settled in a great battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian value of the Peter Thiel”.

McNamee himself has read about non-diplomatic matters: “Some of us, as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we didn’t succeed. We made some things better, we made things worse, and now the liberals have taken over, and they don’t argue about good or bad. They’re here to make money.”

Ten years later, the libertarian McNamee was reportedly moving to Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.

Not everyone agrees on what “revenge” means. For the technical wing – and it is a very important wing – the whole framework is flawed. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributors, and the pressure to put philanthropy on top of them is, at best, a group meeting and, at worst, a shakedown dressed up as a virtue.

A few figures show the current situation like Thiel, who, in fact, did not sign the Pledge himself and does not like Bill Gates (among other things, he allegedly called Gates “a bad, bad person“). Instead, Thiel told the Times that he secretly encouraged a dozen signatories to cancel their pledges and gently nudged former skeptics to drop out. “Many of those I spoke to expressed regret at signing,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “Epstein-next-door, a fake Boomer club.”

He encouraged Musk not to apply, for example, saying that his money could go “to non-profits that will be chosen by” Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly allowed his letter to disappear on the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a word of appreciation.

But Thiel also told the Times something to take a hard look at: that those who remain in the Pledge group feel like they’re being “scorned” — those who are also being shown by the public to abandon the unlimited pledge to donate more money.

It’s a claim that’s hard to make with the behavior of some of the people Thiel is considering. Musk has shown little interest in manipulating public opinion, and for now, a many Americans they already see him inappropriately. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing the constant scrutiny and public hostility every tech giant has endured and came out on the other side feeling confident, at least.

A different picture is happening on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic needs — rent, food, housing, fuel — rose 17% last year. “Jobs,” “home,” “food,” “bills,” and “care” were among the key words in that year’s campaigns. When a 43-day government shutdown halted food stamp distribution last fall, a similar campaign jumped six times. “Life is getting too much 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 this is related to decisions made in charity forums is a matter of debate, but it is happening at the same time, and the timing is hard to ignore.

It is necessary to separate the future of the Promise from the future of the more compassionate. Some of the richest people in technology are still giving; they are just doing it of their own free will, through their own vehicles, 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 the migration of education and social justice to its Biohub network, a group of non-profit organizations, biological researchers working in several cities. “Biohub will be the main focus of our charity in the future,” Zuckerberg said last November.

CZI’s cut seems, at least on paper, less like the pair leaving charity than revising their course. The Zuckerbergs, after all, have committed through the Pledge to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.

Not everyone is redefining the term, 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 closing on December 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies this way dies in shame,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.

This has already happened, this difference between the stable economy and everyone else. The last time the economy settled on anything like this – the Settlement Age, the 1890s to the early 1900s – control did not come from service providers. It came from trust-busting, the federal tax, the estate tax, and finally the New Deal. It came as a policy driven by political pressure so powerful that it should not be ignored. The institutions that forced that reform—a functioning Congress, a free press, a controlled government—look very different today.

What is not in dispute is the speed of change. These economies have been built for years, not generations, at the same time the safety net is being cut. The wealth accumulated by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would be enough to give every person in the world $250 and leave billions richer than $500 billion, according to Oxfam. 2026 Global Inequality Report.

The Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the beginning, a “moral pledge” – no coercion, no consequences, no one to answer to but yourself. The fact that it was once rich tells about the time it was made. That Thiel is now making his stay on the list a form of coercion — and that the Times found that the debate warrants a long explanation — says something about where we are now.