Vague Pledges Notwithstanding, Top Billionaires Remain a Stingy Lot

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When Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge in 2010, some hailed it as a turning point toward an era of much greater generosity from the super-rich than we’d yet seen. Thirteen years on, those hopes seem decidedly misplaced. Pie-in-the-sky, even. 

Few places manifest that story more clearly than Forbes’ “philanthropy scores,” which rank the publication's annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans according to their lifetime giving. While the scores aren’t a perfect metric, and a good amount of billionaire giving likely remains hidden from view, they do provide a ballpark picture of how much of their wealth the super-rich are willing to move out the door — or in many cases, how little.

Since the scores’ debut in 2019, they have highlighted just how stingy most of the nation’s ultra-upper class are, and just how far most Giving Pledgers have to go before they can truly claim to have committed the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. According to Forbes, 70 of the billionaires on this year’s list have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away at least half of their wealth.

Meanwhile, though, after a dip in their collective wealth last year (the first such decrease since the Great Recession), the Forbes 400 are back in command of skyrocketing fortunes. This year, the collective net worth of all 400 entrants is back up to $4.5 trillion this year, equivalent to the group total from 2021 and up $500 billion from 2022. Forbes figures that they’ve collectively given “more than $250 billion” to charity. That comes out to “less than 6% of their combined net worth.”

Six percent is pretty measly, and the Giving Pledge’s optimistic vision of voluntary wealth distribution still seems as distant as ever. However, rising billionaire wealth this year does appear to correlate with very modest signs of improvement in the philanthropy scores. 

This year marked the first since Forbes began assigning the scores in which more billionaires on the list scored a 2 (having given away between 1% and 4.99% of their wealth) than a 1 (less than 1%). A total of 141 scored a 2 this year, as opposed to 127 who scored a 1. Meanwhile, 54 scored a 3 (5 to 9.99%), unchanged from last year. Twenty scored a 4 (10 to 19.99%), up from 18 last year, and a grand total of 11 scored the top score of a 5 (over 20%), up from nine last year. 

A recovering stock market (notwithstanding the recent falloff) probably has at least something to do with modest improvements in the scores this year, with some billionaires loosening their grip on the pursestrings just a little bit as their net worths came roaring back. And yet it’s difficult to generalize. The wealth of some of the Forbes 400 fell this year, and that may be the relevant fact in certain rising philanthropy scores, more so than any sharp increase in those billionaires’ individual giving. In other words, their giving was comparable to last year’s, but represented a larger portion of their smaller fortunes.

Looking at the list of 5s, which mostly remained static from last year, Pierre Omidyar seems to fit that bill. One of three new entrants to the fives club alongside Edythe Broad and Jeff Skoll, Omidyar has faced a sharply falling net worth over the past two years, a fact that seems to be sowing uncertainty throughout the constellation of charities and social enterprises that Pierre and Pam Omidyar preside over. Meanwhile, several newcomers to the list of fours, including Jack Dorsey and George Lucas, also saw declines in their wealth. 

However, no billionaire scoring a 5 in 2022 fell off the list in 2023 save Gordon Moore, who died this spring at the age of 94. The remaining top scorers are a familiar group to anyone tracking big philanthropy: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, MacKenzie Scott, John Arnold, Amos Hostetter Jr., Lynn Schusterman and George Soros. 

Though these figures deserve some credit for leading the pack, committing 20% of your total wealth is still a relatively low bar compared to the goal so many of them have publicly set for themselves. As Forbes itself notes, only one of the 400, George Soros, has actually surmounted the Giving Pledge’s 50% goal — despite the fact that he hasn’t actually signed the pledge. And even Soros, who at age 93 has officially passed the baton at Open Society Foundations to his son Alexander, still has $6.7 billion to his name. Not one of these individuals appears on track, yet, to replicate the recently passed Chuck Feeney’s feat: giving away nearly all of his billions during his lifetime and passing away a mere millionaire, if that.

The Giving Pledge’s founders, for their part, still say they’re aiming for something close. The current understanding out of Gatesland is that not only will Bill Gates give “virtually all” of his $111 billion fortune to the Gates Foundation, but that the behemoth institution will itself spend down within 25 years — of the present, not of the Gateses’ passing. Add to that the likelihood — though not the certainty — that at least a good chunk of the 93-year-old Warren Buffett’s $121 billion hoard will go to the Gates Foundation, and we’re talking about an epic project in philanthropic distribution the likes of which we’ve never seen. 

Consider a scenario in which the Gates Foundation must spend down $180 billion within 25 years, a conservative situation considering current wealth estimates and the assumption that Melinda French Gates’ fortune (currently $10 billion) will go elsewhere. In that case, even the foundation’s supposedly ambitious plan to ramp up its annual spend to $9 billion a year only amounts to 5% out the door per annum — the typical rate for foundations operating in perpetuity, not ones gunning to sunset. As my colleague Michael Kavate argued in greater depth earlier this year, this math makes it hard to see how Gates will follow through on his intention to spend down, if that’s even possible at all.

Meanwhile, MacKenzie Scott’s comparatively modest giving (you can’t say that too often) still seems on a better track to propel her past Soros and eventually even into Chuck Feeney territory, which is her stated goal. Scott has over $37 billion left to go, but with over $14 billion out the door already in just a few years, the 53-year-old’s quest to empty the safe within her lifetime still seems attainable. 

Besides these figures, we cover the high-dollar giving of plenty of other folks on the Forbes 400 list all the time. But as the scores illustrate, even their mega gifts and often complex and well-staffed giving operations still aren’t making much of a dent in their wealth.

Does the average person care much about, or even know about these scores? Probably not, and that provides space for Giving Pledgers to pat themselves on the back without actually fulfilling their goal as the years roll by. But all of this only adds fuel to the growing fire of skepticism toward those who would amass such unbelievable fortunes and then justify it with claims of altruism.