In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge. It was a public commitment, open to the world’s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. As Buffett noted that year, they were talking about trillions over time. The trillions materialized. The giving, less so.
The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top one percent of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent combined. This is the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown eighty-one percent since 2020, reaching a whopping eighteen point three trillion dollars, while one in four people worldwide do not regularly have enough to eat.
This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are now debating whether to honor, or walk away from, a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.
The Giving Pledge’s numbers trace a steady decline. In its first five years, one hundred thirteen families signed the Pledge. Then seventy-two over the next five, forty-three in the five after that, and just four in all of 2024. The roster includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk. These are some of the most powerful people in the world, and yet, in Peter Thiel’s words, it is a club that has really run out of energy. Thiel stated he does not know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been wearing thin for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series Silicon Valley was so relentless in mocking the industry that it reportedly changed actual corporate behavior. One of the show’s writers said that year that public relations departments at some big companies had ordered employees to stop saying they were making the world a better place, specifically because the show had made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.
It was a hilarious joke. The trouble is the idealism being satirized was also, at least partly, real, and what replaced it is not so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalled asking the show’s creator what he was really going for. The creator’s answer was that Silicon Valley is immersed 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 own read on things was less diplomatic. He said some came to Silicon Valley to make the world a better place, and they did not succeed. They made some things better and some things worse, and in the meantime the libertarians took over. He stated those libertarians do not give a damn about right or wrong and are there to make money.
A decade later, the libertarians McNamee was describing have moved well beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what giving back even means. To the libertarian wing of tech, the entire framework is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions. The pressure to layer philanthropy on top of them is, at best, a social convention and, at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.
Few figures capture the current mood quite like Peter Thiel, who notably never signed the Pledge himself. In fact, Thiel says he has privately encouraged around a dozen signers to undo their commitments and has even gently pushed those already wavering to make their exits official. Most of the ones he has talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it, Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.
He has urged Elon Musk to unsign, for example, arguing his money would otherwise go to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates. When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly let his letter disappear from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without a word of public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory note.
But Thiel also said something worth a harder look. He claimed that those who stay on the Pledge’s public roster feel sort of blackmailed, too exposed to public opinion to formally renounce a non-binding promise to give away vast sums of money.
It is a claim that is difficult to square with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and a majority of Americans already view him unfavorably. Zuckerberg spent nearly a decade facing some of the most sustained regulatory and public hostility any tech executive has endured and came out the other side more sure of himself, not less.
A different picture is meanwhile taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraisers for basic necessities like rent, groceries, housing, and fuel surged seventeen percent last year. When the federal shutdown halted food stamp distribution this past fall, related campaigns jumped sixfold. The company’s CEO stated that life is getting more expensive and folks are struggling, so they are reaching out to friends and family to see if they can help them through.
Whether these trends are connected to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is a matter of debate, 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 wealthiest people in tech are still giving. They are just doing it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, toward their own chosen ends. At the start of 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cut about seventy jobs as part of a move away from education and social justice causes toward its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes. Zuckerberg said Biohub is going to be the main focus of their philanthropy going forward.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative cuts look, at least on paper, less like the couple is retreating from philanthropy than recalibrating their approach. The Zuckerbergs have, after all, committed through the Pledge to give away ninety-nine percent of their lifetime wealth.
Not everyone is redefining the terms, either. Gates announced last year that he would give away virtually all his remaining wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades, more than two hundred billion dollars, with the foundation closing permanently at the end of 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced, he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.
It has happened before, this standoff between concentrated wealth and everyone else. The last time wealth concentrated at anything like these levels, during the original Gilded Age, the correction did not come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. It arrived as policy that was 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 dispute is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built in years, not generations, at the same moment the safety net is being cut. The wealth gained by the world’s billionaires in 2025 alone would have been enough to give every person on earth two hundred and fifty dollars and still leave billionaires more than five hundred billion dollars richer.
The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the start, just a moral pledge with no enforcement, no consequences, and no one to answer to but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now frames staying on the list as a form of coercion, and that this argument is reported at length, says something about the era we are in right now.