In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a surprisingly simple campaign called the “Giving Pledge” aimed at the world's wealthiest people. This is a commitment to donate at least half of your assets during your lifetime or upon your death.
This year, he seemed to be looking for that. Over the past decade, the technology industry has been producing billionaires faster than any other industry in history, and the question of how that wealth impacts society is just beginning to take shape. “We're talking trillions of dollars over the long term,” Buffett told Charlie Rose in 2010. There's not much to give.
Those paying attention to these numbers are no longer surprised. The top 1% of American households currently own nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined. This is the highest concentration since the Federal Reserve began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. The wealth of the world's billionaires has increased by 81% since 2020 to reach a whopping $18.3 trillion, despite one in four people in the world not getting enough to eat on a regular basis.
This is a world in which a small number of extremely wealthy people are debating whether to keep or abandon a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of their wealth.
The Giving Pledge numbers reported by The New York Times on Sunday show a steady decline. In the first five years, 113 families signed the pledge. Then 72 in the next five years, 43 in the five years after that, and just 4 in all of 2024.
The current roster includes some of the world's most influential people, including Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan and Elon Musk, but the club is, in Peter Thiel's words to the New York Times, “really running out of energy.”
“I don't know if branding is completely negative, but I feel like it's less important that people participate,” Thiel told the Times.
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For years, the language of doing good has faded in Silicon Valley. Back in 2016, the HBO series “Silicon Valley,” whose characters constantly mocked the industry by insisting they were “making the world a better place,” reportedly changed real corporate behavior.
Clay Tarver, one of the show's writers, told The New Yorker in the same year: “I've heard that public relations departments at some large companies have ordered employees to stop saying, 'We're making the world a better place,' especially because we've been making fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was interesting. But the idealism that is being satirized is also partly reality, and what replaces it is no less interesting. In the same article, veteran tech investor Roger McNamee recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he really wanted to do. “I think Silicon Valley is in an epic battle between the hippie values of Steve Jobs' generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of Peter Thiel's generation,” the judge replied.
“It may sound naive, but the truth is that some of us came here to make the world a better place. And we didn't succeed. We made some things better and made some things worse. And in the meantime, libertarians took over. They don't care about right or wrong. They're here to make money.”
Ten years later, today the Liberals McNamee was describing are in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” means. To the increasingly important liberal wing of the tech industry, that entire framework is wrong. Building businesses, creating jobs and driving innovation is the real contribution, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top of that is conventional wisdom at best. At worst, it becomes a shakedown disguised as virtue.
Few people capture the current mood better than Thiel. He himself never signed the pledge and is not a fan of Bill Gates (he reportedly called Mr. Gates a “terrible, awful person”). In fact, Thiel told the Times that he privately encouraged about a dozen signatories to cancel their commitments and gently nudged those who were already on the fence to formally leave.
“Most of the people I talked to expressed at least some regret for signing,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge “an Epstein-adjacent fake boomer club.”
For example, he urged Musk to deregister, claiming that otherwise his money would go to “left-wing nonprofits chosen by Gates.” When Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong quietly removed his letter from the Pledge website in mid-2024 without any public explanation, Thiel congratulated him.
But Thiel also told the Times that it's worth a closer look. Those remaining on the Pledge's public list feel “some kind of intimidation” — too exposed to public opinion to formally abandon their non-legally binding commitments to provide large sums of money.
This is a difficult claim to reconcile with the public behavior of some of the people Thiel has in mind. Musk has shown little interest in managing his public image, and a majority of Americans already view him negatively at this point. Mr. Zuckerberg faced the most sustained regulation and public hostility ever endured by a tech executive for nearly a decade, and yet he stood up for himself.
Meanwhile, a different situation is taking shape on the ground. GoFundMe reports that fundraising for basic necessities like rent, food, shelter, and fuel jumped 17% last year, with top campaign keywords including “jobs,” “home,” “food,” “bills,” and “care.”
And last fall, when the 43-day federal government shutdown halted food stamp distribution, related campaigns spiked sixfold. “The cost of living is getting higher and higher and people are struggling,” the company's CEO told CBS News. “That's why we're reaching out to friends and family to help them get through this.”
Whether these trends are related to decisions made in philanthropy boardrooms is debatable, but it's hard to ignore the coincidences.
It is worth separating the fate of the Pledge from the fate of broader philanthropy. Some of the wealthiest people in the tech industry still donate. They are simply doing it of their own volition, through their own means, towards their chosen ends.
In early 2026, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) cut approximately 70 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, as part of a move away from education and social justice causes in favor of the BioHub network, a group of non-profit biology-focused research institutions operating in multiple cities. “Biohub will be a major focus of our philanthropic efforts going forward,” Zuckerberg said last November.
The CZI cuts appear, at least on paper, to be more like the couple recalibrating their approach than a retreat from philanthropy. After all, the Zuckerbergs pledged to give away 99% of their lifetime wealth through this pledge.
Not everyone is redefining terms either. Last year, Gates said he would give away nearly all of his remaining assets (more than $200 billion) over the next 20 years through the Gates Foundation, which would close permanently on December 31, 2045. Gates wrote that he was determined not to die rich, citing an old line by Carnegie: “He who dies so rich dies in shame.”
This conflict between concentrated wealth and the rest of the population is not new. The last time wealth was concentrated at this level was during the first Gilded Age, from the 1890s to the early 1900s, and the correction was not brought about by philanthropists. It came from trust destruction, federal income taxes, inheritance taxes, and ultimately the New Deal. It emerged as a policy driven by political pressures too strong to ignore. The institutions that forced that correction—a functioning parliament, a free press, and an empowered regulatory state—look quite different today.
What is not up for debate is the pace of change. These fortunes were built over years, not generations, while the safety net was cut. According to Oxfam's 2026 Global Inequality Report, the wealth earned by the world's billionaires in 2025 alone will be enough to give every person on the planet $250, and the richest will still be over $500 billion richer.
As Buffett has said from the beginning, the Giving Pledge has always been just a “moral pledge.” There is no force, no influence, and no one to answer to except yourself. The fact that it once had a sense of weight says something about the era in which it was created.
The fact that Thiel is now calling it a form of coercion to remain on the list, and that the Times found the debate worth reporting in detail, says something about the situation we're in right now.