It’s feeling like the end of an era. On May 8, Bill Gates announced plans to sunset the Gates Foundation, the standard-bearing charitable organization he started with his now ex-wife Melinda French Gates 25 years ago. The foundation is set to give away more than $200 billion over the next 20 years, including virtually all of Gates’s $112 billion fortune, before winding down in 2045. Gates revealed the plans shortly after longtime Foundation ally Warren Buffett announced he’ll be retiring from Berkshire Hathaway this year, leaving his own $160 billion fortune to a charitable trust, which his children are to disburse within a decade of his death. Now everything’s about to change.
The announcements from both Gates and Buffett mark a dramatic shift in the world of philanthropy. They point toward a near-future when the two most visible benevolent billionaires of the 21st century will have put their last-ever dollars toward humanitarian causes. Considering that 2025 is a volatile, transitional time for the billionaire class and humanitarian efforts in general, it’s unclear whether a new wave of ultrawealthy philanthropists will emerge to continue their work.
The idea of billionaires giving back has been part of American lore since Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller started donating from their massive industrialist fortunes in the late 1800s. The Gates Foundation took it to a new level, however. With a cumulative $43 billion in assistance from Buffett since 2006, the foundation has spent $100 billion in 25 years to bring vaccination and other treatments to some of the world’s poorest areas, preventing the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and malaria. Beyond their own contributions, though, the foundation’s leaders hoped to spur a sense of moral obligation in their fellow billionaires.
The Giving Pledge era
In 2010, inspired by Carnegie’s essay, “The Gospel of Wealth,” Buffett, Gates, and French Gates introduced the Giving Pledge, whose signatories publicly promised to donate more than half their total wealth to charitable causes. It was more than just a way to shame some of the world’s richest people into stepping up their generosity; by getting 240 titans of tech and other industries to sign on, the founders helped promote and normalize the idea that giving away a huge fortune is more impressive than building one.
By 2015, when signees Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan committed $45 billion to their own charity, philanthropy appeared to be in fashion.
Not all of the world’s billionaires had signed on, though. Notable absences included Mark Cuban, Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Of those who did sign the pledge, some seemed to take advantage of its lack of accountability. Elon Musk stayed quiet about his philanthropic activity after signing, before donating $5.7 billion to his own foundation in 2021. Other signees signaled that they were waiting to leave huge donations in their wills eventually—a move that is easy to back out of and ignores all near-term humanitarian needs.
Of course, many of those who signed the pledge ultimately ended up lumped together with those who didn’t. As wealth inequality became an increasingly hotter topic in the late-2010s, the concept of billionaire benevolence came under closer scrutiny.
No trust in charitable trusts
While some billionaires sincerely strive to help as many people as possible with their philanthropy, it’s no secret that others seem to merely use their philanthropy to help themselves. Some treat their foundations as tax shelters, either to avoid paying estate taxes on an inheritance or to claim deductions immediately and then slowly dole out funds over decades. Others use it as a mechanism to launder their reputations. The Sackler family, for instance, donates enormously from its vast pharmaceutical fortune, perhaps in the hope that more people will remember what they gave to museums, rather than their contributions to the opioid epidemic.
As the decade ended with Donald Trump, still in his first term as president, becoming legally barred from operating a charitable organization in New York over his misuse of funds, many Americans could be forgiven for entering the 2020s with a more cynical view of billionaire philanthropy.
Whatever shred of Giving Pledge goodwill still clings to the collective reputation of billionaires in 2025 is now hanging on by a thread. Trump has stocked his second administration with billionaires—and put Musk, the world’s richest man, in charge of rooting out government waste. One of Musk’s first moves after Trump’s inauguration was to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides humanitarian aid for millions around the globe.
If ever there were a moment for benevolent billionaires to demonstrate a commitment to doing tangible good with their philanthropy, it’s right now. A Harris poll from last August indicates Americans would love to see it, too, with 68% agreeing that “billionaires have an ethical responsibility to address humanitarian crises happening around the world.”
The path forward
So, what will the next era of billionaire benevolence look like? As much as the Gates Foundation has performed life-saving, landmark work over the past quarter century, the organization has not been without its issues. Gates and Buffett reportedly disagreed on how the foundation should be managed toward the end, with Buffett warning about the dangers of “arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency” in any large organization, while French Gates exited the foundation to pursue philanthropy in her own way in 2024, three years after her divorce from Gates. Since then, French Gates has joined MacKenzie Scott in charting a new path forward for philanthropy.
Scott, who dissolved her marriage to Jeff Bezos in 2019, has given over $19 billion to nonprofit organizations in recent years. The red-tape-shedding speed of her donation spree has dramatically outpaced traditional foundations, underscoring the urgency of philanthropic work. Going the decentralized route has freed up Scott from all the business of keeping a foundation running in perpetuity, and French Gates has followed her example, donating funds through her investment company, Pivotal Ventures, rather than launching a new foundation.
Although critics argue that this approach fails to provide long-term stability to the organizations the donor assists, it avoids getting bogged down in the board-approved details that can forestall or derail a donation. (By charting an end date for the foundation that bears his name, Gates himself now seems to acknowledge that actually applying funds is more important than keeping the coffers filled forever.)
The new way forward for benevolent billionaires might also involve a no-strings-attached approach. While some foundations tend to get bogged down in micromanaging how their funds are disbursed, Scott has given the organizations she donates to free rein. According to her website, Yield Giving, Scott’s donations have gone to more than 2,450 nonprofit teams “to use as they see fit for the benefit of others.” Critics contend this laissez-faire approach leaves nonprofits ill-equipped to handle Scott’s donations, but a three-year study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy suggests otherwise. French Gates seems similarly engaged in trust-based philanthropy, reportedly asking some donation recipients to make their own decisions on how best to allocate her funding.
As for which kinds of organizations they donate to, Scott and French Gates are unapologetically driven by and focused on their own values. In a moment when all causes related to gender and equality have been demonized, they remain steadfast in their commitment to advancing women’s power at home and abroad. Similarly, Laurene Powell Jobs balances marquee philanthropy, like her recent $3.5 billion pledge toward climate action, with smaller values-based acts like giving grants to local leaders for community projects. Meanwhile, some organizations, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, have scrubbed their charitable works of seemingly anything that could be categorized as DEI.
The Giving Pledge movement wasn’t perfect, but it set a humanitarian benchmark and challenged the ultrawealthy to meet it. The culture of heavyweight charity it fostered created high expectations for billionaires, even if it failed to hold them to account upon not meeting them. A performative donation is still a donation, after all.
There are now more billionaires than ever, with nearly four new ones minted per week in 2024. Perhaps some of them will go on to forge the next iteration of the Giving Pledge, kicking off a new era of high-profile philanthropy and inspiring more MacKenzie Scotts. Considering the state of things in 2025, it sure looks like we’re going to need it.