Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pledges to give away most of his wealth

Not to mention all the pond scum it draws in that has to be constantly filtered out.

In the meantime he's given away billions, but obviously he's invested the billions he still has, so unless his (doubtlessly world-class) money managers were completely incompetent he's going to at least break even.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation "now spends more on global health every year than the World Health Organization — not to mention more than most countries on the planet."[1]

But that philanthropy has its critics. One criticism is that it's very opaque and it's impossible to measure how effective it is. It's also both hugely influential and unaccountable.

Also, from the above-linked article:

"One 2008 article by two Oxford researchers, published in The Lancet, argued that the Gates Foundation was "misfinancing global health" — paying most of its grants out to rich countries and prioritizing infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and malaria) over major chronic killers such as obesity, cancer, and diabetes."

"Another 2009 paper in The Lancet, by a group of University College London health and development researchers, found that despite the Gates Foundation's emphasis on improving the lives of the poor, its grants didn't actually reflect the burden of disease that the poorest face."

"An example: the Gates Foundation has received lots of positive press for its role in financing the eradication of polio. And yet, even that campaign had its critics, says McGoey. In her research, she found key stakeholders in some of the countries that were the focus of the campaign expressing the view that "this was really a priority of wealthy nations and not necessarily developing ones, many of which were more preoccupied with battling illnesses that created a far greater health burden in their nations [such as diarrhoeal diseases in India]. They were compelled to emphasize polio [eradication] against their will."

"Another concern that comes up in the academic literature is that the Gates Foundation is too focused on drugs, vaccines, and other technological solutions for global health problems. But many researchers, by contrast, would prefer a focus on the less exciting but crucial work of strengthening the health systems of poorer countries."

"For similar reasons, the Gates Foundation's work on malaria drew criticism from some corners. In a 2013 article in Global Society, Youde pointed out that the head of WHO’s malaria research, Arata Kochi, sent a memo complaining that the foundation "was stifling debate on the best ways to treat and combat malaria, prioritising only those methods that relied on new technology or developing new drugs.""

"The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."

[1] - https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...

Note that while I think most of the other replies are not necessarily pertinent in that giving away trickles is clearly not "most," the Gates Foundation has given a total of $65.6 billion to date, which is more than half of the Gates family's current net worth, but it isn't funded solely by him. That also means he can't decide unilaterally what to spend the money on, though. I was under the impression it was mostly global health until recently. The education initiatives are relatively new.

He could easily still be on track to give away some amount equal to whatever his net worth is on death by his death, though, and still meet a pledge to do it while alive. I don't know that anyone of extremely high net worth has ever tried to give away 50% all at once. I'm not sure that's even feasible in terms of finding organizations that could take and use that much money in a single year, other than donating directly to the US Treasury general fund.

We have a similar notion in Islam called Riyaa' (رياء), where not only will the person engaging in it not get any rewards in the Hereafter, but he would be actively punished for it.

Intention matters. It is possible that doing a major good deed in public is the right thing to do in order to get other people to do the same. It's all about setting your intentions right.

If you make a foundation, you can pay people to run it, and they can be friends of yours, even family members, but it's not like you can pay them ridiculous amounts of money compared to other foundations. That would be illegal.

That's not to say some people don't try that, I'm sure. But if they abuse it to much, they will likely get caught eventually. Certainly some probably pad just a little, and nobody raises a fuss, but it's not like some instant magic hide from estate tax thing. It's more like, hire your kid that's to stupid/lazy to work for a living. Sure it can be a totally cushy job. It's not any different than mom and pop's grocery store back in the day hiring their idiot kids to make sure the back wall of the store doesn't fall over. Sure it's a mostly pointless job, but it's not illegal to do that.

Since it's their money to control, they can of course use it to prop up some particular viewpoint, but it mostly washes out, since both aisles of the political camp can and do stuff like that.

So that article is mostly just uninformed crap, sorry.

you may not like them, but a lack of imagination is no reason to condemn others

The key thing is that over time, Microsoft transitioned to a point where Bill Gates wasn't running things day-to-day and investors became comfortable with him not having any control. At that point, him selling shares was no big deal.

At the other end of the extreme would be someone like Elon Musk, where Tesla's stock price is almost entirely dependent on him being at the helm. If he were to walk away now, the shares would tank in value.

Jeff Bezos is somewhere in between. Clearly, Amazon would run okay without him, but he still has some involvement. He certainly can't sell all of his shares, but if he sells over time and makes it clear (and credible) that he is selling in order to use his money elsewhere (rather than trying to time the market because he thinks the stock is overpriced), the share prices of Amazon should hold up just fine.