"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. I don't know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join."
"The U.S. wealth divide has progressed to new extremes, with the top 10% of households holding more than two-thirds of the nation's wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. The majority of the country's wealth remains in the hands of older generations. And the wealth accumulation has hollowed out the middle class over the last few decades."
"Philanthropy has long acted as a de facto realization of trickle-down economic theory. A shift away from that philanthropic framework-and one of the most organized efforts in modern history to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the country's richest-could signal that the money spigot is tightening."
Peter Thiel has become a vocal critic of The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic campaign launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett to encourage the world's wealthiest to donate at least 50% of their wealth. Thiel is actively working to undermine the initiative, urging signatories to abandon their commitments and dismissing it as an "Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club." He argues the pledge has lost energy and cultural importance since its initial years. Signing numbers have declined significantly, with only four pledges in 2024 and 14 in 2025. This shift reflects broader concerns about wealth concentration, as the top 10% of U.S. households now hold over two-thirds of national wealth, with philanthropy serving as a mechanism for wealth redistribution that may be weakening.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]