with as much wealth as they started with. John Arnold, who together with his wife Laura has given hundreds of millions to pandemic relief, drought response, criminal justice reform, and maternal mortality prevention, signaled last year that he was retiring from his investments.
That allowance for different approaches is baked into the framework of the Pledge itself, which is and always has been fundamentally permissive in its wording: signers Promising to contribute the majority of their wealth to charitable causes, “either during their lifetime or in their will.”
The aside — “either during their lifetime or in will” — seems to have been less noticed. Some signers never meant to give while alive — to leave their fortune to future generations, a form of philanthropic long-termism; others aimed more modestly to mitigate income inequality.
It’s possible this most recent wave of signed pledges simply marks a reckoning with a promise made years ago by people who didn’t initially intend to walk away from their fortunes overnight. In Thiel’s reckoning, they’re still losers who for some reason have signed a weak and meaningless pledge. “What matters is getting a whole bunch of net winners to acknowledge that the current system does not work,” he told the Times.
Thiel’s views on the giving economy have a political edge. He’s an admirer of Vice President JD Vance. Another Biden administration’s alumnus tells me he was one of the people to believe that the Trump family would, once elected, use the Biden family’s philanthropic infancy to get its global charity to veil suspicious transactions. “I don’t think they even bothered reading things or to list them on the way out,” this person said. “The Trumps are just in it to get rich and they will always be in it to get rich.”
If, at a given moment in time, it must have felt inevitable that the richest people who’ve ever been alive would act more like Carnegie or Rockefeller. That all of them would sign on to at least a very modest, very voluntary pledge to make charity part of their legacy. Who knows? Gates, after all, capped off the pledge’s launch in 2010 by telling Charlie Rose that he and Buffett were “just two mercenary types that helped out” with the aim of getting other wealthy people to “pick up the cudgel.”
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