Just a few months after Warren Buffett convened a series of high-end dinners across America to collect signatures for something called the Giving Pledge, he was feeling optimistic about his new idea for philanthropy.
Seated in May 2010 at Charlie Rose’s circular table next to his partners in the effort, a smiling Melinda French Gates and her husband, Bill, Mr. Buffett foresaw something revolutionary.
“We’re talking trillions over time,” Mr. Buffett said. “You hope to establish a new norm.”
One by one, the world’s richest people would be convinced to commit over half of their money to nonprofit causes. “In just a few short months we’ve made good progress,” Mr. Buffett said that December, as 17 more families joined in.
A week later, Mr. Buffett and the Gateses made their first of two visits with President Obama to talk about the Pledge in the Oval Office. They were back to the White House seven months later, when Mr. Obama lavished praise on the Pledge in a 30-minute session with a few dozen signers, according to a person in the room.
In those heady times, it was unmistakably fashionable to sign the Giving Pledge, which launched with Mr. Rose’s gauzy TV interview and a Fortune cover story. The project was born in an era when people like Mr. Gates epitomized a humanitarian culture that espoused both big capitalism and big philanthropy. Being seen as a good billionaire who gave back was important. Republicans and Democrats alike embraced the Gates Foundation’s priorities — U.S. education, global health and gender equality.
Now, it’s stylish, in a Silicon Valley contrarian sort of way, to bash the Giving Pledge.
Over the last two years, there has been a growing backlash from the billionaires who are its target donors. One of its first signers suggested he was “amending” his pledge to account for his for-profit ventures. Another signed it, and then in an occurrence without precedence, unsigned it.
No Oval Office visits anymore: President Trump’s team describes the Pledge as almost a punchline. There’s even a quiet campaign by one pro-Trump tech billionaire to destroy it. Instead of signing up for nonpartisan philanthropy, some billionaires seeking impact are looking for a more direct route, spending more than ever on American elections.
The zeitgeist has changed very fast.
Aaron Horvath, a sociologist who has studied the Giving Pledge, called it a “time capsule” of that 2010 era. “It feels old school,” he said. Billionaires, he said, now think: “I can keep my head down and keep making money. I don’t have to put up with this charity charade anymore.”
This is an era of a more voracious capitalism, of billionaires trending right and getting ahead by embracing an administration that is happy to dole out favors. Many of today’s ascendant billionaires are dismissive of philanthropy as nothing more than public relations.
In this worldview, the real way to give back is via business success, to the redound of the U.S. economy. Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, has said that his businesses “are philanthropy.”
And that’s all to say nothing of how the public perception of one of the Pledge’s figureheads, Mr. Gates, has blown up over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That scandal led to his divorce from Ms. French Gates in 2021 and her ultimate exit from the foundation, which administers the Pledge, in 2024. The Gates Foundation itself, meanwhile, is out of season in politics. Its causes, such as global health, have been attacked mercilessly by the Trump administration.
Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said. He has his own Epstein ties, but he calls the Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
John Arnold, a Houston billionaire who made money as an energy trader and was one of the earliest signers, said that what looks like tough times for the Pledge are really just tough times for nonprofits.
“There was a backlash against a lot of charitable giving,” he said. “And the Pledge kind of got swept up in that because it became synonymous with billionaire giving.”
The slowdown
The Giving Pledge did, as Mr. Buffett hoped, indeed establish something of a new “norm” in philanthropy. More than 250 families signed it, including those of Mike Bloomberg, Sam Altman and MacKenzie Scott. The Pledge became a way for the uber-wealthy to announce they’d arrived.
Ms. Scott signed it in 2019, following her split from Jeff Bezos. A year later she began her enormous, rapid-fire philanthropic giving. Mr. Arnold is another of its most successful stories. Forbes estimated that he and his wife, Laura, have given away over 40 percent of their net worth to charity, almost all since signing it — and they’re only in their early 50s.
“In its early years, the Giving Pledge helped build norms where few existed” said Taryn Jensen, who now runs the Pledge. “Our goal is to keep building a culture where giving is the norm and to provide the support that helps turn commitment into action.”
But the rate of signers has plummeted in recent years. In the Pledge’s first five years 113 people signed; 72 in the next five years; and just 43 in the next five, including a mere four signers in 2024. Last year was a relatively successful year by recent standards, with 14 signers, including Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Drew Houston of Dropbox.
“The value proposition has changed because the erosion of general trust, the polarization of everything over the last years,” said Tom Tierney, who advises wealthy donors at Bridgespan, one of the nonprofit sector’s blue-chip advisory firms, and is on the board of the Gates Foundation. “You’re more likely to be criticized for giving large amounts of money away now than praised. That probably wasn’t as true 15 years ago,” he said, citing “contention” around extreme wealth.
The first signers were largely in the personal social circles of Mr. Buffett and the Gateses — bona fide American business celebrities who were greeted with adoring press. Nowadays, signers are increasingly based overseas or are lower-profile. Media coverage is dutiful.
The requirements for participation aren’t very high. Signers must assent to a news release and typically a letter posted publicly on the foundation website about the commitment. They’re invited to the optional annual gathering of fellow billionaires held at a luxury resort.
And then there’s the actual giving, for which there’s no mechanism of enforcement. Even at the outset, Mr. Buffett stressed to Mr. Rose it was just a “moral pledge.”
The Giving Pledge does not track whether its signers make any progress toward their commitments. Officials have long worried about seeming like nags and they do not press signers to give to anything in particular. Since Mr. Trump started his second term, Mr. Gates’s team has tried to guide other billionaires, ever so gently, toward supporting the public health programs decimated by his administration’s cuts. But the Pledge said that its own approach has always been “issue-agnostic.”
Terms like “net worth,” and “charity” and even “billionaire” all offer plenty of wiggle room.
“There’s all kinds of grayness,” said Mr. Tierney, who added most signers he knows intend to give away most of their billions only after they die.
Research published last summer by left-wing critics of the Pledge argued that very few signers were actually giving away their money at a fast enough rate to drive down their net worth. Most philanthropic donations went to intermediary organizations, they said, such as their own foundations, or happened en masse after they died, which technically satisfies the Pledge.
Ms. Jensen said many signers “have already met their commitments or are steadily working toward them.”
Still, for someone on the right like Mr. Thiel, there is a symbolic point to be made in his campaign against the Pledge.
“I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Mr. Thiel said. His own charitable philosophy is centered around for-profit businesses; his foundation principally funds those who drop out of college to create start-ups.
Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist close to Mr. Gates, asked Mr. Thiel to sign in the early 2010s. Mr. Thiel told Mr. Khosla that he did not consider it a high-status community.
“They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” Mr. Thiel said, positing that some of the people who sign it now aren’t even billionaires. (The Pledge says it is open to those whose net worth is under $1 billion but “plan to give away at least $500 million and are in a position to do so.”) “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”
More recently, he has privately encouraged Elon Musk, a 2012 signer, to unsign it. He told Mr. Musk that his money would go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates,” according to a speech he gave.
Mr. Thiel told The Times he believed that quitting the Pledge outright “feels very, very dangerous, and people sort of feel blackmailed” to stay on the public list of signers. “There may be a lot of ways to undo it that are short of a big public statement.”
Ron Conway, a venture capitalist signer who is close to Mr. Gates, said comments like Mr. Thiel’s made little sense to him. Mr. Conway, who is active in Democratic politics, said the Giving Pledge had plenty of conservatives and moderates.
“Some people say that the Giving Pledge is aligned with liberal causes, or is woke, so to speak, and that couldn’t be the further from the truth,” he said.
The backlash grows
The first tangible evidence of souring came two summers ago from Brian Armstrong, the co-founder of Coinbase, who had happily signed the pledge in 2019 at the urging of Mr. Gates’s friends, like Mr. Conway.
Mr. Armstrong, an outspoken crypto executive who now evinces a disdain for liberal politics, attended at least one Pledge gathering. But just five years later, he was suddenly out. One day in mid-2024, Mr. Armstrong’s letter vanished from the Pledge website.
The Pledge said that his exit was voluntary. He has never said anything publicly about why he left the community, and he did not return requests for comment to elaborate on his decision.
Mr. Thiel was uninvolved in his move. But upon reading the news, he said he couldn’t help but send Mr. Armstrong an attaboy.
Before him, the only people to leave or be booted from the Giving Pledge were a handful of criminals and con men like Sam Bankman-Fried, who removed himself from the community before the Pledge could formally boot him.
A year after Mr. Armstrong unsigned, Larry Ellison — who had been another of the first batch of signers fifteen years earlier — said in a rare post on X that he was suddenly “amending” his pledge. While he still believed in the Gates-led agreement, he wrote, he was also seeking to channel his money into for-profit initiatives like a program at the University of Oxford that technically would not fall under the nonprofit rubric of the Giving Pledge.
Mr. Ellison’s unusual letter, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” remains untouched on the Giving Pledge website. He has not returned requests for comment on what he meant.
Scott Bessent, Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary, has gotten in on the flogging. At the DealBook summit in early December, he described a “panic among the billionaire class” during the global financial crisis that led to the Giving Pledge, which he called “well-intentioned” but “very amorphous.”
A more “concrete” accomplishment, Mr. Bessent said, was something like the $6 billion donation from Michael and Susan Dell, who have not signed the Pledge but are funding “Trump accounts” that could ride the waves of the stock market to create nest eggs for lower-income children, mixing philanthropy with capitalism.
Tech billionaires in the Trump era have tended to bash traditional nonprofit philanthropy more generally.
In a podcast with The Free Press founder Bari Weiss in 2024, Marc Andreessen — also not a Pledge signer — described an unspoken “deal” that used to exist. Billionaires would make money, give back through philanthropy, and then be praised by the media and society. (In 2014, Vogue profiled Mr. Andreessen’s philanthropist wife Laura, writing that she was “the one persuading this new generation of tech tycoons to give their riches away.”)
“That washes away all of your sins,” Mr. Andreessen said. “Reclassifies you as from a sort of suspect business mogul to a virtuous philanthropist.”
Now, the entire deal is broken, said Mr. Andreessen, visibly upset. He now regularly complains about the rise of “woke” ideology within the nonprofit sector that turns people against the tech sector and the wealthy, something that, in private conversations, he has stressed even to nonprofits he has supported in the past.
Not all billionaires have turned away from giving, of course. “It is sad to me that many wealthy individuals (especially in the tech industry) have recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless,” wrote Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, in a January essay.
And yet, befitting the times, even the 43-year-old Mr. Amodei hasn’t signed the Pledge himself. Anthropic has ties to the so-called effective altruist movement, which prioritizes charity but is also far more concerned than the Giving Pledge is with whether that charity is effective.
The Founding Trio
The Pledge’s three founders remain committed to their project, but age, divorce and scandal have complicated the picture.
Mr. Buffett, now 95, told The Times that he has had second thoughts about some of his philanthropic commitments that were not feasible, such as “ideas that I had 60 or so years ago when my wife, Susie, and I planned out our philanthropic future,” on reducing the threat of nuclear war.
But on the Giving Pledge?
“I firmly believe in the Giving Pledge and consider it quite a success, though my physical limitations have eliminated my participation in the annual get-together,” Mr. Buffett wrote in an email. “I have continued to contact possible members but only on a minor scale in recent years. Bill Gates has continued major efforts.”
Still, Mr. Gates is battling his reputational damage from the Epstein files. The Pledge comes up in a few emails sent by Mr. Epstein, who regularly criticized it as public-relations exercise.
Ms. French Gates recently presented the Pledge’s success as somewhat qualified. (Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates declined interviews requests.) She told Wired in December that some signers have been giving money at a “massive scale,” but many others had not. “Some are doing it, and some are trying or aren’t ready to,” she said.
“I wish we had been even more successful with the Pledge than we have been to date,” she said. “It’s a problem to continue working on.”
Theodore Schleifer is a Times reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world.
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