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Comment by toastercat | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: I've seen a lot of billionaires make a similar pledge. Are there any dead billionaires we can see as examples of keeping good on a pledge like this?

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These billionaires pledging to give away their money before they die is just a big slap in the face to everyone else. It’s virtue signaling because these same people do everything they can to pay as little tax as possible and various other aggressive financial tactics for themselves and their companies.

So instead of promoting redistribution of wealth while they’re alive, they make sure they get all the power, status, influence, and benefits of their wealth, and only once they’re dead or near it do they plan on giving it away.

Chuck Feeney is the only one I've ever heard of. Note though that he is still alive and famously did not make a public pledge, but tried to give everything away anonymously. The type of person that would make a public pledge does not seem like the type of person who will actually give all their money away.

The people that are most famous for pledging to give it all away — Gates, Buffet — are far far richer than they were when the hoi polloi started reading public relations articles about their philanthropic pledge.

Amazing PR scam.

Yeah, just scan through the list of names on The Giving Pledge Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge), which helpfully lists their net wealth so you can see their failure at a glance.

Also note that the pledge is only to give away "at least half" which is pretty unambitious for a multi-billionaire. If you have $10 billion and give away $5 billion, you've made no impact on your own life and sacrificed nothing. It is not comparable to someone with $100,000 giving away $50,000.

Well... that's part of the irony really, in that when you are as rich as Crassus, it's actually work to try to divest it. What seems to really happen is that money moves from the family to a separate foundation, and then the foundation has the work in perpetuity of managing and granting out the money. With that much money, families really are set up through the end of time, assuming they have any degree of management and responsibility over the bit they don't put into a foundation.

It's work, but it's not like a lifetime of work. MacKenzie Scott has managed to donate $14 billion in her first three years of being a professional philanthropist. If you actually want to give your billions away you can pay some people to help you do it relatively quickly. There doesn't need to be a perpetual foundation unless you want there to be.

Gates has given away about $60 billion so far. His net worth today is about $103 billion. So he's given away over half. How is that a scam? Especially for the charities that benefited and presumably are doing good work for those who need it the most.

"The Billionaire Who Wasn't" - impressive book about Chuck Feeney - very impressive on how he accomplished giving away his fortune.

A lot of funny business happens even when they do, such as charities ran by their kids who get high paying executive roles, or non-profits that do a lot of curious things on behalf of for-profit companies.

Possibly Andrew Carnegie.

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