Ultra-Wealthy Donors to Watch: Who’s Taken the Giving Pledge So Far in 2022?

Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe. TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s hard to know what to make of the Giving Pledge these days. Much of the veneer has worn off, especially as it becomes clear that the voluntary commitment does little to actually spur a significant increase in billionaire largesse. Besides, though individual billionaires continue to fascinate the American public, the super-rich as a class just aren’t very popular these days.

While we’ve done our fair share of critiquing the pledge lately, it’s still worth keeping an eye on. The Giving Pledge is one of the few institutions knitting together a varied set of super-citizens — ultra-wealthy Americans who have outsize influence — with wildly divergent careers, lifestyles and philanthropic interests. As such, it remains a useful way to look at the evolving narratives around the giving of the ultra-rich, and how individual philanthropists think about the enterprise they’re engaged in.

Over the past couple of years, there’s typically been a December announcement of who’s taken the pledge over the intervening 12 months, and I see no reason to expect otherwise in 2022. But there have been five pledges so far during the first half of the year, with the usual mix of headline grabbers and the lesser knowns.

We’ll have to wait and see whether the flagging stock market will affect the willingness of more uber-wealthy individuals to commit over the second half of 2022 (it shouldn’t). But in the meantime, here’s who’s taken the pledge this year so far and where their giving is headed.

Sam Bankman-Fried

The 30-year-old cryptocurrency wunderkind’s net worth has fluctuated wildly this year as crypto prices flail, but that hasn’t stopped the FTX CEO and co-founder from taking the pledge. Now worth just under $9 billion according to Bloomberg (it was over $25 billion at the end of March), Bankman-Fried is still both the youngest and the wealthiest pledger on this year’s list. Even as his net worth jumps around all over the place, he’s been buying into the dip, purchasing BlockFi and considering an acquisition of Robinhood.

Bankman-Fried has also been leaning into his new role as billionaire super-citizen with gusto — including with recent disappointing results as a political donor. When we spoke with him about his evolving giving last year, he seemed open to a wide variety of issues and approaches, some involving his firm’s charitable arm, the FTX Foundation. It’s worth noting that like many young male tech luminaries, Bankman-Fried’s all about that effective altruism. So far, that has meant attention to high-level risks for the planet, such as climate change and the potential effects of emergent technologies.

The effective altruism comes through strongly in Bankman-Fried’s brief pledge message, where he wrote, “A while ago, I became convinced that our duty was to do the most we could for the long-run aggregate utility of the world.”

Mark Pincus

Pincus is best known as the founder of mobile gaming company Zynga, though he founded or co-founded a number of other tech startups before that. Now 56, Pincus is worth roughly $1.4 billion and is executive chairman at the firm, which developed FarmVille and other popular gaming properties.

While Pincus hasn’t yet been active philanthropically, that seems set to change. Among this year’s Giving Pledgers (so far), his is the longest and most interesting letter. It begins on a deeply personal note, relating Pincus’ early career struggles and his efforts to quit smoking. It goes on to discuss how the northern California town of Bolinas, where Pincus resides, confronted COVID and other challenges.

“When a community comes together to solve its own problems, it reclaims its agency and becomes emboldened. This community focus is core to my giving philosophy,” Pincus wrote. He followed that up with his plans to “reduce and offset our family’s historical and future carbon footprint by a factor of 10” — an unusual inclusion in these pledge letters. There are also references to a “Future Self Project,” through which Pincus plans to offer “investments and ideas to existing and new projects focused on improving all of our futures.” We’ll have to wait and see what exactly that means.

Anne Wojcicki

Co-founder of genetic testing company 23andMe, Wojcicki was also previously the spouse of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The 48-year-old has given in the past through the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, alongside her former husband, and lately via the Anne Wojcicki Foundation, where she gives alongside her sister, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

The Wojcicki sisters are among the most successful women in tech, and they have a wide variety of philanthropic interests. Anne Wojcicki has long backed medical research, including major support for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. She also backed the Breakthrough Prize along with Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Art Levinson and Yuri Milner.

In 2020, the Anne Wojcicki Foundation reported assets of around $500 million. Smaller grants have gone out recently to a number of Bay Area education nonprofits, with larger sums flowing to Ashoka, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation, the Barack Obama Foundation and the Tony Blair Foundation. The biggest grant in 2019, however, went to a donor-advised fund at the National Philanthropic Trust. Wojcicki included no letter or message with her Giving Pledge.

Mala Gaonkar

Gaonkar is an investment manager who was previously managing director at the hedge fund Lone Pine Capital. The 52-year-old is now in the process of launching her own hedge fund, SurgoCap Partners, which is expected to be up and running early next year with at least $1 billion in assets. Born in the U.S. and raised for a time in India, Gaonkar now resides at least part of the time in the U.K.

In 2015, Gaonkar founded the Surgo Foundation, which has characterized itself as “a nonprofit ‘action tank’ focused on behavioral drivers impacting health and development.” As of the end of 2020, the Surgo Foundation has become a vehicle for Gaonkar’s personal philanthropy, while many of its previous functions have transferred to Surgo Ventures, a new trans-Atlantic nonprofit that has focused primarily on tackling COVID and other global health challenges. Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell is on its board.

In her pledge letter, Gaonkar discussed the interpersonal fulfillment that giving can bring. She also took a philosophical turn, asking, “If we were about to be born into the world, not knowing anything about our gifts of talent and status and family and community, in what kind of society would we choose to live?” Gaonkar went on to say she seeks to give in that spirit, “where justice is based directly on the intrinsic and equal value of other people’s lives.”

Simone and Urs Wietlisbach

The only non-American Giving Pledgers in 2022 so far, the Swiss couple’s wealth comes from Partners Group, a Swiss private equity company that Urs Wietlisbach co-founded in 1996. Forbes currently pegs his net worth at $2.4 billion. Along with other Partners Group co-founders, Urs Wietlisbach started the impact investing firm Blue Earth Capital in 2015. Blue Earth Capital is solely owned by the Blue Earth Foundation, where Wietlisbach sits on a three-person board.

In a short pledge letter, the couple expressed their openness to “gain more proficiency in the areas of giving we still want to explore and learn how we might have the greatest lasting impact on improving the world.”