The billionaires made a promise — now some want out Connie Loizos 9:40 PM PDT · March 15, 2026 In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign aimed at the world’s wealthiest people called the Giving Pledge : a public commitment to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death.
The year seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history that decade, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose in 2010. The trillions materialized; the giving, not so much.
The numbers no longer surprise anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined — the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, even as one in four people worldwide don’t regularly have enough to eat.
This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are debating whether to honor — or walk away from — a voluntary and unenforceable promise to give away half of what they have.
The Giving Pledge’s numbers, reported on Sunday by the New York Times, show a steady decline. In its first five years, 113 families signed the Pledge. Then 72 over the next five, 43 in the five after that, and just four in all of 2024.
The roster currently includes Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, and Elon Musk — some of the most powerful people in the world — and yet, in Peter Thiel’s words to the New York Times, it is a club that’s “really run out of energy.”
“I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join, ” Thiel told the Times.
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One of the show’s writers, Clay Tarver, told The New Yorker that year: “I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly.”
It was hilarious. But the idealism being satirized was also partly real, and what replaced it isn’t so funny. Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, in the same piece, recalled asking Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge what he was really going for. Judge answered, “I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s own read on things was less diplomatic: “Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place. And we did not succeed. We made some things better, we made some things worse, and in the meantime, the libertarians took over, and they do not give a damn about right or wrong. They are here to make money.”
A decade later, today the libertarians McNamee was describing are in the Cabinet.
Not everyone agrees on what “giving back” even means. To the increasingly significant libertarian wing of tech, the entire framework is wrong: Building companies, creating jobs, and driving innovation are the real contributions, and the pressure to layer philanthropy on top is, at best, a social convention; at worst, a shakedown dressed up as virtue.
Few figures capture the current mood quite like Thiel, who never signed the Pledge himself and is no fan of Bill Gates (he has reportedly called Gates an “ awful, awful person “). In fact, Thiel tells the Times he has privately encouraged around a dozen signers to undo their commitments, and has even gently pushed those already wavering to make their exits official.
“Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” Thiel said, calling the Giving Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
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