In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a very simple campaign called the Giving Pledge. This is a public promise made to the world’s wealthiest people to donate at least half of their wealth during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to demand it. Technology was creating billionaires faster than any other industry in history, and the question of what impact that wealth would have on society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking about trillions of dollars over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. Trillions of dollars have been realized. Giving, less so.
To anyone paying attention, the numbers are no longer shocking. The top 1% of American households now have nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. This is the highest concentration since the Federal Reserve began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, the wealth of billionaires has increased 81% since 2020 to a whopping $18.3 trillion, yet one in four people around the world do not have enough to eat on a regular basis.
We live in a world where a small number of very wealthy people are debating whether to honor their voluntary, unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have, or whether to back out of that promise.
The Giving Pledge’s numbers, the New York Times reported Sunday, show a steady decline. In the first five years, 113 households signed the pledge. There will be 72 people in the next five years, 43 in the five years after that, and only four in 2024. The list includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Elon Musk. These are some of the most influential people in the world. But as Peter Thiel told the Times, the club is “a really depleted club… I don’t know if the brand image is completely negative,” Thiel said. “But it feels less important for people to participate.”
The language of doing good in Silicon Valley has been in decline for years. In 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley” mocked the industry so mercilessly. Those characters forever claimed that they were “making the world a better place” by chasing valuations. This is said to have led to actual changes in corporate behavior. Clay Tarver, one of the show’s writers, told The New Yorker that year: “I heard that the public relations departments of some large companies have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We are making the world a better place,’ especially because we have ridiculed that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was a funny joke. The problem is that the idealism being satirized was at least partly real, and what replaced it isn’t all that funny. In the same article, veteran technology investor Roger McNamee recalled asking Silicon Valley founder Mike Judge what he actually wanted. Judge’s response: “I think Silicon Valley is locked in a huge war between the hippie value systems of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian liberal values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s reading was less diplomatic. “Actually, some of us, as naive as it sounds, are here to make the world a better place. But we haven’t succeeded. We’ve made some things better and some things worse. Meanwhile, the liberals have taken over and they don’t care about right or wrong. They’re here to make money.”
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A decade later, the liberals McNamee describes have moved far beyond Silicon Valley. Some are now in the cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what it means to “give back.” In the increasingly important field of liberal technology, the entire framework is wrong. Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are real contributions, and the pressure to top them with philanthropy is at best a social convention, and at worst a wave masquerading as virtue.
Few people capture the current mood better than Thiel, who neither personally signed the pledge nor is a fan of Bill Gates (among other things, he reportedly called Gates a “terrible, terrible person”). In fact, Thiel told the Times that he personally encouraged about a dozen signatories to cancel their commitments and even gently pushed those who were already wavering to formalize their withdrawal. “Most people I talked to at least expressed regret for signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “an Epstein-adjacent fake boomer club.”
For example, he urged Musk to rescind his signature, otherwise his money would go to “left-wing non-profits of Gates’ choosing.” When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly disappeared his letter from the pledge website in mid-2024 without public explanation, Thiel sent him a congratulatory letter.
But Thiel also said something to the Times that is worth a closer look. That means those who remain on Pledge’s public list feel “kind of intimidated.” In other words, it is too exposed to public opinion to formally abandon its non-binding promise to donate large sums of money.
This 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 now already view him negatively. Zuckerberg has spent nearly a decade facing the most persistent regulatory and public hostility any tech executive has ever endured, and his opponents have become more confident in him.
Meanwhile, another picture is forming on the ground. GoFundMe reported that fundraising for basic necessities such as rent, groceries, housing and fuel surged 17% last year. ‘Work’, ‘home’, ‘food’, ‘bills’, and ‘care’ were among the top keywords for that year’s campaign. When food stamp distribution was halted last fall due to a 43-day federal shutdown, related campaigns surged six-fold. “Life is getting more expensive and people are struggling, so they’re looking to their friends and family to see if they can help,” the company’s CEO told CBS News.
Whether these trends are linked to the decisions made by charity boards is debatable, but they are happening simultaneously and the timing is hard to ignore.
It is worth separating the fate of pledges and the fate of philanthropy more broadly. Some of the wealthiest people in tech are still giving. They are simply doing it on their own terms, through their own means, and toward a goal of their own choosing. In early 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) laid off about 70 people, or 8% of its workforce, as part of a move away from education and social justice and toward the Biohub network, a group of nonprofit biology-focused research institutions operating in several cities. “BioHub will be a major focus of our philanthropy going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI cut appears, at least on paper, to be a recalibration of the couple’s approach rather than a retreat from philanthropy. Ultimately, the Zuckerberg family pledged to donate 99% of their wealth over their lifetimes.
Not everyone redefines terms. Gates announced last year that he would donate his entire remaining fortune (more than $200 billion) over the next 20 years through the Gates Foundation, which will close permanently on December 31, 2045. Citing Carnegie’s old line, “He who dies rich dies in disgrace,” he wrote that he was determined not to die rich.
This confrontation between concentrated wealth and everyone else has happened before. The last time wealth was concentrated at these levels (originally during the Gilded Age, from the 1890s to the early 1900s), no corrections were made from philanthropists. It came from the trust bust, the federal income tax, the estate tax, and eventually the New Deal. It was arrived at as a policy driven by political pressures too powerful to ignore. The institutions that forced those corrections—a functional parliament, a free press, an empowered regulatory state—look quite different today.
What is indisputable is the pace of change. This fortune has been built over years, not generations, and at the same time the safety net is being cut. According to Oxfam’s 2026 Global Inequality Report, in 2025 alone, the wealth gained by the world’s billionaires would be enough to give every person on the planet $250 and still leave billionaires more than $500 billion richer.
The giving pledge has always been just a “moral pledge,” as Buffett has said from the beginning. There is no execution, there are no consequences, and you have no one to answer to but yourself. The fact that it once had weight speaks volumes about the era in which it was produced. Thiel is now framing staying on the list as a form of coercion, and the fact that the Times found the claims worth reporting at length says something about what we’re going through right now.
