Angela Weiss/AFP/Dia Dipaspil/Getty Images
(LR) Melinda French Gates, Mackenzie Scott.
Editor's note: Jill Filipovic is a New York-based journalist and author of “Ok Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Was Left Behind.” twitterThe opinions expressed in this op-ed are her own. See more opinion at CNN.
CNN —
In a wildly unequal world, it can feel a little rich to root for billionaires, even if they're using their vast fortunes to help others rather than buy another Gulfstream.
Courtesy of Jill Filipovic
Jill Filipovic.
Something is irrefutably broken in a world system in which a small minority amass untold wealth, most people struggle simply to survive (and many cannot), and we praise the super-rich for donating generously to the suffering masses.
But this is the global system we actually have, in which some billionaires behave far more generously and ethically than others, and their work should be contrasted with those who simply collect more toys or watch their net worth grow endlessly.
Melinda French Gates is one great example: This week, she explained why she was stepping down from the Gates Foundation, which she co-founded 20 years ago, and said the next phase of her philanthropic work would focus on the rights of women and girls, including in the United States.
French Gates has long been an advocate for family planning and women's rights abroad, and is now committing $1 billion to these issues by 2026. Very little of the charitable giving in the United States goes to organizations that work on women's and girls' rights, just 2 percent, according to a New York Times op-ed by French Gates. She wants to be a part of correcting this situation. She has also adopted an innovative strategy: she funds existing organizations with a good track record, and has given $20 million in grants to 12 outstanding people, including a former New Zealand prime minister and an Afghan girls' education activist, to fund organizations that are doing great work.
And in the United States, French Gates' funding targets reproductive rights at a time when American women see their abortion rights rolled back half a century ago. It remains to be seen whether French Gates will actually take the urgent and crucial step of funding abortions; her pledges are vague on family planning and reproductive rights. But she has at least committed to funding organizations that work to secure and report on these rights at a critical time.
MacKenzie Scott is another billionaire woman who is using her wealth for good. While her ex-husband Jeff Bezos was off in space and cheating on her new boyfriend, Scott pledged to give her entire fortune to charity. Earlier this year, she announced that she would donate $640 million to 361 small organizations.
Most billionaires don't behave this way. According to Forbes, two-thirds of the top 400 billionaires in 2023 donated less than 5% of their wealth to charity. And of those same 400, only 11 donated more than 20%. French Gates and Scott are those two, along with two other women, meaning that more than a third of the country's most generous billionaires are women. This is wildly disproportionate to the actual number of women among the ultra-rich: only 60 women, or 15%, are on the Forbes Top 400 list. In other words, female billionaires are much more likely to donate a significant portion of their wealth than their male counterparts.
Evan Agostini/InVision/AP/File
FILE – MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, California, March 4, 2018. (Photo by Evan Agostini/InVision/Associated Press, File)
MacKenzie Scott has turned philanthropy as we know it upside down. Melinda French Gates is in the spotlight.
America's richest people have a dismal track record of giving. The top five on Forbes' 2023 list are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, and Larry Page. Musk, Ellison, and Page donate less than 1% of their wealth, and Bezos less than 5%. Buffett gives away more than 20% and is a well-known donor to important causes, including women's and human rights worldwide. However, some of the richest, including Musk and Bezos, spend a lot of money on various vanity projects. Musk is infamous for buying Twitter (now renamed X) for $44 billion, and Bezos has spent about $5.5 billion on rocket launches into space.
And some billionaires spend their money on things that many would argue are wrong: Many of the ultra-rich donated to former President Donald Trump's campaign, for example.
Certainly, some have pledged to use their wealth for good. Sam Altman of the controversial OpenAI recently signed the Giving Pledge, a pledge started by Warren Buffett, French Gates, and her ex-husband Bill Gates for the super-rich to give away at least half of their wealth. There is no enforcement, no actual contract, just a moral commitment. But the Giving Pledge is one tool to encourage the wealthy to at least give away what they receive.
Altman's decision to sign on now certainly seems a bit ironic, as artificial intelligence has received a lot of negative press, and OpenAI in particular has come under intense scrutiny after actress Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of plagiarizing her voice, despite her refusal to do so. Altman needs a PR win, and may be hoping that his philanthropic efforts will help repair his tarnished image.
That's unlikely. But if he keeps his pledge and gives money to organizations that meet important needs, it'll be a win. And that seems to be part of what the Giving Pledge is about: encouraging the rich to give not just out of their own goodwill, but also because they'll receive public recognition if they do (and scorn if they don't).
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Women like French Gates and Scott, and men like George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, deserve credit for donating large amounts of money. Philanthropy is far from solving the problems that create the demand for philanthropy in the first place, and in a more just world, so much of the world's wealth would not be in the hands of so few people. But to the extent that this is the case, we should view people who give more favorably than those who hoard for themselves.
And we should be more ruthless about those who hoard it. It is deeply selfish, greedy, and frankly antisocial to hoard more than one needs when so many need far more than they have. Many people who are hardly billionaires are donating what are, to them, large sums of money to close these gaps — so that pregnant women have access to prenatal care, so that young children have basic immunizations, so that minority rights are protected, so that there is a roof over their heads, so that the hungry have food, so that preventable diseases are prevented and deadly diseases are treated or cured.
It's morally reprehensible for people with more money than they could spend in a lifetime not to do the same, so while we can applaud good billionaires who give away their wealth even if we think they represent a larger problem of inequality, we should also be critical of the wealthy who turn their backs on their fellow human beings and simply hoard piles of cash.
