Just a few months after Warren Buffett convened a series of fancy dinners across the United States to collect signatures for something called the Giving Pledge, he was optimistic about his new idea of philanthropy.
Sitting in May 2010 at Charlie Rose’s roundtable, alongside his partners in the effort—a smiling Melinda French Gates and her then-husband, Bill Gates—Buffett predicted something revolutionary.
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“We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett said. “The idea is to establish a new norm.”
One by one, the world’s richest individuals would be persuaded to commit more than half of their money to nonprofit causes. “In just a few months we’ve already made good progress,” Buffett said that December, when 17 more families joined.
A week later, Buffett and the Gates made the first of two visits to President Barack Obama to talk about the pledge in the Oval Office. They returned to the White House seven months later, when Obama heaped praise on the initiative in a 30-minute session with a few dozen signatories, according to a person present.
In those euphoric times, it was undeniably “trendy” to sign the Giving Pledge, which began with Rose’s light-hearted TV interview and a Fortune magazine cover story.
The project was born in an era when figures like Gates symbolized a humanitarian culture that defended both big capitalism and big philanthropy.
Being seen as a “good billionaire” who gives back to society was important. Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Gates Foundation’s priorities—U.S. education, global health, and gender equality.
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Now it has become fashionable—in typical Silicon Valley rebel style—to criticize the Giving Pledge.
Over the past two years, a backlash has grown among the billionaires who are the initiative’s target audience. One of its early signatories suggested it was “amending” its pledge to consider its ventures to be for-profit. Another signed and, in an unprecedented case, later withdrew his signature.
No more visits to the Oval Office: President Donald Trump’s team describes the appointment almost as a joke. There’s even a discreet campaign by a pro-Trump tech billionaire to destroy him.
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Instead of embracing nonpartisan philanthropy, some impact-seeking billionaires are opting for a more direct path, spending more than ever in American elections.
The spirit of the times changed very quickly.
Aaron Horvath, a sociologist who has studied the Giving Pledge, called it a “time capsule” of that 2010 era. “It feels like a thing of the past,” he said. According to him, billionaires today think: “I can keep to myself and continue making money. I no longer need to participate in this philanthropic act.”
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This is an era of more rapacious capitalism, of billionaires leaning to the right and moving forward by aligning themselves with a government willing to dole out favors. Many of today’s rising billionaires view philanthropy with disdain as nothing more than public relations.
In this worldview, the true way to give back is through success in business, with benefits to the U.S. economy. Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, has said that his businesses “are philanthropy”.
And that’s not to mention how the public perception of one of the pledge’s leading names, Bill Gates, was shaken by his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. The scandal led to his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021 and her departure from the foundation that manages the pledge in 2024.
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The Gates Foundation itself, in turn, lost political relevance. Its causes, such as global health, have been harshly attacked by the Trump administration.
Peter Thiel, a technology billionaire and frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he encouraged about a dozen signatories to abandon the pledge in private conversations. “The majority I spoke to at least expressed regret for signing,” he said. He himself has ties to Epstein, but calls the pledge a “fake baby boomer club with ties to Epstein.”
John Arnold, a Houston billionaire who became wealthy as an energy trader and was one of the first signatories, said what appears to be a difficult time for the pledge is actually a difficult time for the nonprofit sector.
“There has been a backlash against a lot of philanthropic giving,” he said. “And the commitment ended up being dragged down by this, because it became synonymous with donations from billionaires.”
The slowdown
The Giving Pledge has indeed succeeded, as Buffett had hoped, in establishing something close to a new “norm” in philanthropy. More than 250 families have joined, including those of Mike Bloomberg, Sam Altman and MacKenzie Scott. Pledge became a way for the ultra-rich to announce they had made it to the top.
Scott signed on in 2019 following his split from Jeff Bezos. A year later, he began his massive and accelerated philanthropic giving. Arnold is another success story. Forbes estimated that he and his wife, Laura, have already given away more than 40% of their net worth, almost all of it after signing — and they’re still in their 50s.
“In its early years, the Giving Pledge helped build norms where they barely existed,” said Taryn Jensen, who now leads the initiative. “Our goal is to continue building a culture where giving is the norm and offering support to turn commitment into action.”
But the rate of memberships has plummeted in recent years. In the first five years, 113 people signed; in the next five, 72; and in the subsequent five, just 43, including just four in 2024. Last year was relatively positive by recent standards, with 14 signatories, including Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Drew Houston of Dropbox.
“The value proposition has changed because of the erosion of general trust and the polarization of everything in recent years,” said Tom Tierney, who advises wealthy donors at Bridgespan and sits on the board of the Gates Foundation. “Today you are more likely to be criticized for donating large amounts than praised. That probably wasn’t as true 15 years ago,” he said, citing the “controversy” surrounding extreme wealth.
The first signatories were largely in the personal social circles of Buffett and the Gates—authentic American business celebrities, received with admiration in the press. Today, signatories are increasingly foreign or less well-known. Media coverage is protocol.
The requirements for participation are not very high. Signatories must agree to a press release and usually a letter posted on the foundation’s website about the pledge. They are invited to an optional annual meeting with other billionaires, held at a luxury resort.
And then comes the donation itself, for which there is no monitoring mechanism. From the beginning, Buffett emphasized to Rose that this was simply a “moral commitment.”
Research published last summer by left-leaning critics of the pledge argued that very few signatories were, in fact, giving away their money at a pace sufficient to reduce their wealth. Most philanthropic giving would go to intermediary organizations, like their own foundations, or occur en masse after death — which technically fulfills the pledge.
Jensen said many signatories “have already met their commitments or are consistently moving toward doing so.”
Still, for someone on the right like Thiel, there is a symbolic point to his campaign against compromise.
“I have strongly discouraged people from signing it and then cautiously encouraged them to withdraw their signatures,” Thiel said. His own philanthropic philosophy focuses on for-profit businesses; his foundation mainly funds young college dropouts to create startups.
Vinod Khosla, an investor close to Bill Gates, asked Thiel to sign in the early 2010s. Thiel told Khosla he didn’t consider it a high-status community.
“They got an incredible number of signups in the first four or five years, but it seems like the project has lost steam,” said Thiel, suggesting that some people signing up today aren’t even billionaires. (The pledge states that it is open to anyone who is worth less than $1 billion but “plans to donate at least $500 million and is in a position to do so.”) “I don’t know if the brand has become negative, but it seems much less important to participate.”
Ron Conway, an investor and close signatory of Bill Gates, said comments like Thiel’s don’t make sense to him. Conway, active in Democratic politics, said the Giving Pledge includes many conservatives and moderates.
“Some say the Giving Pledge is aligned with liberal causes, or that it is ‘woke,’ so to speak, and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.
The reaction gains strength
The first concrete sign of wear and tear came two summers ago with Brian Armstrong, co-founder of Coinbase, who had signed the pledge in 2019 at the encouragement of Bill Gates’ friends, including Conway.
Armstrong, a crypto executive known for his disdain for liberal policies, attended at least one meeting of the group. But just five years later, he left abruptly. One day in mid-2024, his letter disappeared from the pledge website.
The organization stated that his departure was voluntary. He never publicly explained why and did not respond to requests for comment.
Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, also criticized the initiative. At the DealBook event in early December, he described a “panic among the billionaire class” during the global financial crisis that led to the creation of the pledge, which he called “well-intentioned” but “very vague.”
A more “concrete” achievement, he said, would be something like the $6 billion donation from Michael Dell and Susan Dell, who did not sign the pledge, but finance accounts that can grow with the market to form savings for low-income children — combining philanthropy and capitalism.
Not all billionaires have abandoned philanthropy, of course. “It is sad to see that many wealthy individuals (especially in technology) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic view that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless,” wrote Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, in a January essay.
Still, reflecting the current situation, Amodei himself, aged 43, did not sign the commitment. Anthropic has ties to the effective altruism movement, which prioritizes giving, but is more focused than the Giving Pledge on measuring its effectiveness.
Melinda French Gates recently presented the success of compromise as relative. (She and Gates declined interviews.) In December, she told Wired that some signatories donate “en masse,” but many others do not. “Some are doing it, and others are trying or are not ready yet,” he said.
“I wish we had been even more successful with the commitment than we have been so far,” he said. “It’s an ongoing challenge.”
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