In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, 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 call for it. Tech was churning out billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would affect society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. The trillions materialized. Giving, less so.
The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined—the highest concentration recorded by the Federal Reserve since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown by 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide do not eat regularly.
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 pledge to give away half of what they have.
The Giving Pledge’s numbers, reported Sunday by the New York Times, track a steady decline. In the first five years, 113 families signed the pledge. Then 72 over 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, in Peter Thiel’s words to the Times, it’s a club that has “really run out of energy,” Thiel knows if it’s the negative energy. outlet, “but it feels far less important for people to participate.”
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been thin for years. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” was so relentless in mocking the industry — its characters forever insisting they were “making the world a better place” while chasing valuations — that it allegedly changed the actual behavior of the company. One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, told The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that at some of the big companies, PR departments have ordered their people to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we’ve made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was a funny joke. The problem is that the idealism that was satirized was also, at least in part, real—and what replaced it isn’t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalled in the same piece that he asked Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really after. Judge’s response: “I think 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 reading of things was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually, naive as it sounds, 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 meanwhile the libertarians took over, and they don’t care about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
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A decade later, the libertarians McNamee described have moved far beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” even means. For the libertarian wing of technology – and it is an increasingly significant wing – the whole framework is wrong. Building businesses, creating jobs and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top of them is at best a social convention and at worst a shakedown masquerading as virtue.
Few figures capture the current mood quite like Thiel, who notably never signed the pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he has reportedly called Gates a “terrible, terrible person”). In fact, Thiel tells the Times that he has privately encouraged about a dozen signatories to renege on their commitments and has even gently nudged those already wavering to make their exits official. “Most of the people I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret for signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
He has urged Musk to opt out, for example, claiming his money would otherwise go “to left-leaning nonprofits that will be chosen by” 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 his congratulations.
But Thiel also told the Times something worth looking into: that those who remain on the pledge’s public list feel “kind of blackmailed” — too exposed to public opinion to formally renege on a nonbinding pledge to give away huge sums of money.
It is a claim that is difficult to reconcile with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing public perception, and at this point 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 exec has endured and came out the other side more sure of himself, not less.
Another image, meanwhile, is taking shape on earth. GoFundMe reported that fundraising for basic needs — rent, groceries, housing, fuel — rose 17% last year. “Work”, “home”, “food”, “bills” and “care” were among the most popular keywords in campaigns that year. When the 43-day federal shutdown halted the distribution of food stamps last fall, related campaigns jumped 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 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 promise from the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the richest people in tech still give; they just do it on their own terms, through their own vehicles, towards their own chosen goals. 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 its Biohub network, a group of nonprofit, biology-focused research institutes operating across multiple cities. “Biohub will be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI carve-outs look, at least on paper, less like the couple is retreating from philanthropy than about recalibrating their approach. After all, the Zuckerbergs have committed through the pledge to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth.
Not everyone is redefining the terms either. Gates announced last year that he would give away virtually all of his remaining fortune through the Gates Foundation over the next two decades — more than $200 billion — with the foundation closing permanently on Dec. 31, 2045. Invoking Carnegie’s old line that “the man who dies thus rich dies dishonored,” he wrote that he was not determined to die rich.
It has happened before, this distancing of concentrated wealth from everyone else. The last time wealth concentrated at anything like these levels — the original Gilded Age, the 1890s to early 1900s — the fix didn’t come from philanthropists. It came from trust-busting, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and finally the New Deal. It arrived as a policy driven by political pressures too powerful to ignore. The institutions that forced that correction—a functional Congress, a free press, an empowered regulatory state—look significantly different today.
What is not disputed is the pace of change. These fortunes have been built over years, not generations, the moment the safety net is cut. The wealth gained by the world’s billionaires alone in 2025 would have been enough to give every person on earth $250 and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer, according to Oxfam’s 2026 Global Inequality Report.
The Giving Pledge was always, as Buffett said from the start, just a “moral promise”—no enforcement, no consequences, no answering to anyone but yourself. That it once carried weight says something about the era that produced it. That Thiel now portrays 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.