Editors’ Note: HistPhil co-editor Benjamin Soskis traces the negative vibes shifts in the world of big donors to the spread of philanthro-pessimism, the product of a “stewardship trough,” reflecting a crisis of confidence in the power of the wealthy to change the world for good with their giving.
Are the vibes off in the world of mega-philanthropy? That was the message of a March 2026 New York Times article from Teddy Schleifer on the declining status of the Giving Pledge among the nation’s wealthiest citizens, full of billionaire gripes about the folly of philanthropy (plus a few billionaire laments about peers who have “recently adopted a cynical and nihilistic attitude that philanthropy is inevitably fraudulent or useless,” as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei phrased it). That was also the assessment of IP editor David Callahan, who noted, in an op-ed published not long after, “signs of an ongoing vibes shift among the super rich.” But Schleifer and Callahan invoked the idea of a vibes shift in different ways. For Schleifer, it emanated from a real transformation in philanthropic practice, a reflection of a “zeitgeist [that] has changed very fast” as more billionaires channeled their fortunes into politics or corporate ventures. But Callahan seemed to consider vibes more an obfuscation of underlying practice, the miasma of social media discourse that clouded over the reality that billionaires were not, in fact, retreating from philanthropy. “On the contrary, more billionaires are giving away more money than ever before,” he wrote.
Although I agreed with Callahan’s point on purely quantitative terms—technically, there is more money being given away—I wasn’t sure it really invalidated Schleifer’s argument, given that the scale of wealth now pooling in the pockets of the super rich is such that the numerator is dwarfed by the denominator, which could itself be a drag on vibes. And, like many others, I had been witnessing how, in other realms, vibes could have a self-reinforcing power of their own—tracking how a vibecession might have fueled political discontent. On top of this, I had myself been registering a vibes shift in the world of philanthropy, and, like Schleifer, I suspected it did have a relationship to practice—as a reflection or a cause of changes in how the super rich give and think about the responsibilities of wealth.
So these last few months, I’ve been puzzling over what the source of the bad vibes was, whether and why it mattered, and what can be done about addressing it. Ultimately (and to no one’s surprise who knows my analytic tendencies), I think to understand the state of today’s philanthropic vibes, you have to place the current moment in broader historical context. That context helps us appreciate that big philanthropy now exists in what might be called a stewardship trough, a low moment of confidence in the power of the wealthy to change the world for good with their giving.
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For last several decades, the most important dynamic in the philanthropic realm has been the rise of the engaged living mega-donor. Up until the 1990s, and with a few notable exceptions (Walter Annenberg, William Hewlett and David Packard, among others), the philanthropic landscape was dominated by legacy foundations, whose founders had left the scene, and left their fortunes to be redistributed by a professional staff of philanthropoids. Even in the Bay Area, little pressure was applied on the wealthy to leverage their entrepreneurial capacities toward philanthropic ends. “The donor’s role was to give away their money to the community foundation—and then, preferably, to die,” Peter Hero, who led Silicon Valley’s largest community foundation, recalled.
This all began to change at the turn of the millennium, with the boom of tech and finance fortunes, and the corresponding elevation into positions of prominence of a corps of engaged mega-donors, with Bill Gates as the most obvious exemplar. If these philanthropists represented a break with the recent past, they often looked back to a previous Gilded Age at the last turn of the millennium for models in the small band of industrial titans who forged the institutions of modern philanthropy—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Sage. And so it was no surprise that Warren Buffett gave a copy of Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth” essay, which provided the most stirring call to take on the mantle of the engaged living donor, to Gates before he turned over a large part of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This ‘Gospel’ fueled the rise of a set of ideas whose 21st century version could be loosely grouped together as “philanthro-capitalism.” This involved the personal engagement of the wealthy individual with philanthropy, staked to his or her particular entrepreneur talents, which in turn laid down a cord linking the imperatives of capitalist accumulation to philanthropic redistribution. This was not just a private ethic; when combined with the media focus on ultra-high net worth individuals, it also meant increased scrutiny on philanthropy and philanthropists, and the coalescence of a set of widely celebrated norms, a modern notion of capitalist stewardship, which had the function both of recruiting more UHNWIs donors to the cause, and of legitimizing concentrated wealth. In the first decade of the new millennium, this norm took root in the soil of tech and finance industries and flowered, helping to inspire a subsequent generation of often young, fantastically wealthy donors. Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, directly credited Bill Gates for influencing his own identity as a philanthropist.
On the one hand, one could argue that the trend lines have continued, such that the current moment represents the apogee of the engaged living mega-donor. As Inside Philanthropy has documented, living donors now occupy pride of place within the philanthropic landscape. “There are not only more living billionaires at the top of American philanthropy today than at any time in the last 40 years,” IP’s Michael Kavate has noted, but “over the decades, their numbers have doubled, tripled or even grown ten-fold.” According to Kavate, 20 of the nation’s top 50 private foundations had living founders in 2024, while billionaires or their children now control half of the top 100 foundations.
In a sense, the prominence of living mega-donors simply reflects a broader reality of our contemporary political and attentional economy: the oversized space that billionaires (and a one-time trillionaire) take up in our collective psyche. We are constantly confronted with the power they exert—over resources, over politics, over news cycles, over cultural spaces, over public discourse—and the privileges they hold and hoard.
And yet, for all the attention they command, this is also a moment when the public status of the most prominent of those billionaires, as philanthropists, is at a strikingly low ebb. Just cast an eye over the list of the wealthiest Americans, or the billionaires most often in the headlines (for their business machinations or prognostications, their lavish consumption, their unhinged tweets, their proximity to and claims on political power), and then try to conjure up a corresponding philanthropic ambition or vision. It is not merely that we are bombarded with indications of the massive wealth accumulating all around us, with new billionaires being minted daily, without a commensurate upsurge of mega-donations (the nonprofit consultancy Bridgespan has calculated that annual giving by US households with more than $500 million in assets hasn’t budged much from around 1.2% of assets in recent years). The delta between getting and giving among UHNWI’s has been a fact of life for decades. But the “stewardship gap” we are now facing is not merely a matter of money. It’s that the philanthropic profiles cultivated by our wealthiest citizens, which before had covered some of the nakedness of late-stage capitalist excess, have become increasingly threadbare, leaving more of the plutocratic underbelly exposed.
The relative dearth of exemplary models of active and assured philanthropic engagement, when combined with high-profile denigrations of philanthropy unchecked in public discourse by widely-disseminated, unequivocal success stories, has encouraged the spread of what might be called philanthro-pessimism. And this, in turn, has been a main source of bad philanthropic vibes.
Confidence in institutions or social practices is often a reflection of relative trendlines. So one factor boosting philanthro-pessimism has been the spectacle of high-profile donors in programmatic retreat, responding with little resistance to the Trump administration’s targeting of certain cause areas, like racial equity or climate change. Most prominently, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have abandoned their giving toward social advocacy and public policy in areas like criminal justice reform and immigration, in favor of a concentration on the intersection of biology and AI. This doesn’t necessarily reflect an absolute dimming of ambition—helping to “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases” in the near future would be a pretty big deal—but it does represent a circumscription of philanthropy’s ambit and a statement about what is possible (or prudent) to do through grantmaking. (It’s worth mentioning here that this retreat has created space for legacy foundations and their executives to reassert their pride of place as norm-shaping leaders of the philanthropic sector).
The move also reflects a broader shift in the political culture of large swathes of the West Coast tech community, away from the progressive orthodoxies of the last decade and toward a right-coded libertarianism that is generally favorable to the Trump administration and hostile to what it considers a “woke” philanthropic establishment and “nonprofit industrial complex.” (Besides Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Marc Benioff are examples of this swing, with the Paypal Mafia exerting a strong gravitational force). As that Times piece on the waning cultural power of the Giving Pledge documented, public expressions of disdain for philanthropy seem to be just part of the patois of this faction of the new tech elite. And because of their proximity to Trump, or their facility with (and in some case, control of) social media, these types of views tend to receive a disproportionate amount of attention, boosting an algorithmically-enhanced philanthropic nihilism.
Over the last few years, Elon Musk has used X to promote the view that most philanthropic giving, and many of the nonprofits it supports, are making the world a worse place, while insisting all the while that his own corporate endeavors represent the real philanthropy (his recent pledge to give all American children a share of SpaceX stock has to be understood in these terms). In a July podcast appearance, David Sacks, an investor and member of that Paypal Mafia who until recently served as Trump’s AI and crypto czar, claimed that calls for Musk and other billionaires to increase their philanthropic commitments were never made to “solve a problem. In fact, all the problems just get worse. It’s just to figure out how to separate you from your money.” Not long after, Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO who became the first crypto billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge in 2018 and then the first to withdraw from it by 2024, told Katie Miller that, while “the common view is that philanthropy is a noble cause,” he believed that “a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative for the world.” (On X, Musk wrote, “He’s right.”)
It should be relatively easy to counter that argument. But a more aggressive case for contemporary philanthropy is hampered by a pervasive sense that it has come up short in its battles against the most pressing problems we now face—climate change, economic inequality, the global spread of authoritarianism, and now AI. This is not to say that philanthropy has failed to secure any notable wins against these dangers. But those wins have been partial and muted, and so seems the confidence in philanthropy of even many of its most ardent contemporary champions. These days, it is very difficult to imagine a book subtitled, like the original 2008 Philanthrocapitalism was, “How the Rich Can Save the World.”
The irrational exuberance of peak philanthro-capitalism certainly had its faults and excesses, but it did at least give a generation of engaged living donors confidence in the power of philanthropy and affirm a commitment to the responsibilities of great wealth, tethering accumulation to redistribution. The apparent lack of such an affirmative ethic among many of the billionaire class helps to explain a recent phenomenon, the swelling of a nostalgia for the first Gilded Age generation of donors, among commentators who have little affection for the political economy of the period. It was, after all, as the American Inequality Substack recently explained, a time when the wealthy “treated their fortunes effectively as a public trust…deeply intertwined with the systems that helped give them that wealth.” “The industrialists of the Gilded Age were often ruthless competitors and deeply imperfect human beings. Yet many eventually embraced a civic responsibility that extended beyond their businesses,” Scott Curran wrote recently in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “These men were far from saints. But they did grasp the connection between wealth, stewardship, and philanthropy.” In other words, we seem to be living through a 21st century Gilded Age with substandard gilding. That doesn’t help the vibes.
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Of course, as Callahan argued, the vibes are not all bad. Most recently, a spate of high-profile, record-breaking gifts by living donors to higher education has partially punctured the pall of philanthro-pessimism, affirming that it’s still possible for living donors to do big, new things with a ten-figure gift. And in her own, quiet, steady way, MacKanzie Scott continues to “empty the safe.”
An even bolder challenge to philanthro-pessimism has come from a cohort of (to borrow a New Testament term) “cheerful givers,” donors who have made defying the bad vibes surrounding philanthropy into an affirmative, principled act. Shortly after the New York Times published its takedown of the Giving Pledge, Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, who had signed the Pledge himself just a few months before, offered a rejoinder. In the Times, Newmark called on billionaires to “stop whining about the Giving Pledge and Try Giving Yourselves.” Newmark’s op-ed, in a sense, relied on its own counter philanthropic ethic, linking the way he made his money to how it should be given away. He did so, he claims, simply by being in the right place at the right time (he calls himself “the Forrest Gump of the Internet”). “Making money isn’t proof to me that I know something better than someone else.” And so he embraces the vocation of philanthropy with a Gump-like equanimity. “I use the money I made to help people that are trying to make life better for all of us humans.” (For Newmark, this involves contributions to organizations that help veterans and military families, that combat online scams, promote independent journalism…and protect pigeons). It represents a sloughing off of the burdens of philanthro-capitalism: the devaluation of his own exceptional talents and capacities as the reason for his wealth is paired with an unself-conscious, untroubled joie de donner.
A similar spirit animated Dolly Parton’s giving, so widely celebrated in countless obituaries after her recent death. In a piece about her philanthropy, the Times quoted her speech accepting the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2022. “I just give from my heart. I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will.” That sort of talk read like a balm against the vituperative dismissals of philanthropy proliferating on X. In a way, Newmark and Parton are exemplars of the guidance that Bridgespan has started to offer wealthy clients, after years of stressing the difficulty of giving strategically, the hard work necessary to avoid the myriad pitfalls placed in the path of the big giver. Now, confronting the persistence of billions sitting on the sidelines, they open with very different advice: “Don’t overthink it.”
Then there is effective altruism, the movement which seeks to apply analytic rigor to decisions regarding charitable and philanthropic giving, including cause prioritization, and which last found itself in the media spotlight through its association with disgraced crypto-donor Sam Bankman-Fried. EA is having another moment—in a recent cover story, the Economist called it “the 21st century’s most important social movement”—in part because its links to those most concerned with the “existential risks” to humanity posed by AI (many of whom happen to work for frontier AI labs), and also because of the expectation that an imminent cresting wave of AI philanthropy could be directed to EA-aligned organizations, like Coeffificent Giving or GiveWell (FD: I’m a grantee of both). If this is the case, it won’t only be the shared concerns about rogue AI that attracts a new class of Anthropic billionaires; it will also be the pull of a confident and affirmative philanthropic ethic, espoused by a network of fellow mega-donors, and embodied by a mushrooming cohort of pooled funds featuring important, tractable, and neglected causes, meant to cater to HNWI donors (it’s a tribute to the impulse behind these pooled funds that led Open Philanthropy to change its name to Coefficient Giving). It’s a paradox worth noting that even with all the attention it gives to existential risks, the EA movement has generally been immune to philanthro-pessimism.
The current moment, then, is a strange one in which the philanthropic vibes are generally off and yet we are anticipating a possible historic wave of philanthropic giving with potentially transformative impact. As the New York Times recently outlined, a good part of this AI philanthropy wave might be directed to global health, but it will also likely sluice to a vast range of other idiosyncratic causes. This will all be very pluralistically welcome. But that prospect will in part depend on widely diffused good vibes, encouraging these novice donors that they can do great things with their newly minted fortunes. In the stewardship trough we find ourselves in, confronting a vacuum of broadly persuasive affirmative ethics—with philanthro-capitalism collapsing in on itself, the capitalist pole cannibalizing the philanthropic one; with religious idioms and imperatives holding declining power within the tech elite and with trust-based philanthropy’s dubious hold on them as well—it’s worth asking where those vibes will be generated. These days, I’ve begun to think of good vibes as a sort of collective good that the sector often disregards, but that have positive externalities extending widely across the sector. This doesn’t mean we should sheathe any of our critical impulses or refrain from pointing out the limits and even dangers of philanthropy. But it does mean that we need to think as well about a compensatory set of beliefs about the good philanthropy can achieve and why it’s still necessary for our wealthiest citizens to pursue it—for the benefit of us all.
-Benjamin Soskis
Benjamin Soskis is the co-editor of HistPhil.
