For the last quarter-century, Bill Gates has been the benefactor behind what has been a long reign of one of the country’s largest private philanthropic foundations, a giant that has long eclipsed almost every other charitable institution.
The Gates Foundation, with its commitment to a large, professionalized staff, driven by quantifiable data, and its focus on global health, has served as a model for many other donors. And as an individual, Gates has long been recognized as the most prominent philanthropist in the world in terms of media attention, praise, and public awareness. As one of the co-founders of the Giving Pledge—the campaign to encourage the world’s billionaires to donate more than half their wealth to charitable causes—he has also become effortlessly identified with the effort to shape philanthropic norms. (Disclosure: I am an employee of the Urban Institute, which receives funding from the Gates Foundation).
Indeed, this is the best context to understand the significance of Gates’s recent announcement that he will give virtually all his wealth to the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years, and that the foundation would “close down all operations by the end.” With Gates’s net worth hovering around $100 billion, and the foundation’s base of over $200 billion, this is a move of staggering scale. As he explained: “I’ve decided to return my money to society much faster than I originally planned.”
In monetary terms, this promise would be a big deal on its own. It would require the foundation to achieve an unprecedented level of annual spending, likely doubling its current $9 billion per year. And it would necessitate contemplating a world in which the Gates Foundation no longer exists.
But the extent to which Gates’s announcement could spur broader changes in philanthropic norms may be just as significant. To put it simply: it could galvanize billionaires to give more, and perhaps more importantly, to give more quickly.
“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates told The New York Times in an interview highlighting his announcement. He noted that his new commitment was driven by an optimism about the power of philanthropy to dramatically improve global health, which contrasts strangely with a prevailing sense of fading hope.
But viewed another way, what was most significant about Gates’s announcement was not the dollar figure that attracted so much attention, but his embrace of the importance of timing in philanthropy. By philanthropic timing, I mean elevating one’s responsibility toward the current moment—with its needs, demands, and opportunities—as the driving motive behind giving.
In launching his announcement, Gates has made it a priority to get more money out the door. He told The Times that “this is a ‘miraculous time,’ ripe with all kinds of possibilities for breakthroughs in global health, such as one-shot gene therapy for HIV/AIDS and new tools for reducing maternal mortality.” Given all these opportunities, Gates said, “It makes a huge difference to take the money and spend it now rather than later.”
That might sound obvious. But for many philanthropists, foundations are instruments designed as much to preserve wealth as to give it away. Gates is now putting his celebrity clout behind the latter, pushing the idea that current concerns should come with large-scale philanthropic contributions.
But there’s obviously another reason why the current moment matters. Gates’s announcement recognizes that he is committing additional funds at a time when governments around the world, especially in the United States, are cutting back on their own funding for global aid. He has maintained his insistence that philanthropy can never adequately replace government funding for global health; in 2023, for example, USAID managed over $35 billion in allocations. He is positioning large-scale giving less as a confirmation of the superiority of private philanthropy than as an urgent argument that the Elon Musk team is wrong about aid.
“It’s unclear whether the richest countries in the world will continue to stand up for their poorest people,” Gates wrote in a blog post explaining his decision. “But the one thing we can guarantee is that, throughout all our work, the Gates Foundation will support efforts to help people and countries lift themselves out of poverty.”
For this reason, Musk—who has boasted about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper”—has become something of a nemesis in the rollout of the announcement. “The image of the richest man in the world killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times.
It’s an unusually public dispute for Gates, who until recently had studiously cultivated a public persona that avoided any hint of partisanship. Still, his comments evoked an inconvenient fact: Musk signed the Giving Pledge (in 2012). But Gates drove this point home directly, and in doing so, delivered an implicit critique of the philanthropic norms that had governed leadership in the sector. “The Giving Pledge: an unusual aspect of it is that you can wait until you die and still fulfill it,” he said in the New York Times interview.
And it’s true that from its conception, the Giving Pledge has been agnostic about the question of timing. The metric of success for the pledge was to get “this set of billionaires to think earlier in life about how they’re going to give money back, whether that’s at the end of life or upon death,” as Melinda French Gates put it.
Gates is now signaling a call for donors to do more than start thinking about giving, but to start giving more now. As he explained, he is now pushing the wealthy to increase not just the scale of their giving, but also the pace of their giving.
It’s something Gates learned from the example of Chuck Feeney, co-founder of a duty-free shopping empire. Feeney gave significant amounts anonymously for years, only voluntarily adopting a public identity as a mega-donor as a means to spread an evangel of “giving while living.” It’s an ethic that Gates name-checked in his announcement as having “shaped how I think about philanthropy.”
The Need to Give While Living
There are several reasons why donors have generally preferred to defer their giving, from not having the time to dedicate to philanthropy, to the compulsion to get the gift exactly right, to the desire to retain funds, to simple inertia. At an institutional level, one of the main challenges is the commitment to perpetuity, which imposes a certain cap on spending levels to ensure that the endowment doesn’t run dry.
For much of the latter half of the 20th century, and into the first decade of the new century, perpetuity was a kind of implicit default in the philanthropic sector. In the deliberations over the 1969 Tax Reform Act—the regulatory framework under which foundations would operate for the next half-century—a congressional consultant proposed a 40-year time limit on foundations. The proposal, championed by Senator Al Gore Sr., was ultimately rejected, and instead, an annual payout requirement of 6 percent (later changed to 5 percent) was passed as part of a “grand bargain” that traded some commitments for “philanthropic freedom.”
But over the past two decades, the trend of treating perpetuity as the norm or default for philanthropy has eroded. The reasons are varied, from the urgency of the environmental crisis (several of the first wave of spend-down foundations of the 21st century were dedicated to this cause), to the propensity of young tech donors to view their resources as tools to be mobilized quickly.
This could well be a pivotal moment for the norms surrounding philanthropic timing.
In a 2020 global survey, Rockefeller’s philanthropy advisors found that nearly half of organizations established in the 2010s were founded as time-limited vehicles, compared to around 20 percent in the 1980s. A 2022 survey found that “of philanthropies established since 2000, almost a quarter (23 percent) were set up as time-limited, representing a rise of 22 percentage points.”
Indeed, Bill and Melinda French Gates never actually committed their foundation to perpetuity. Seven years after the foundation’s creation in 2000, they had pledged to close it 50 years after their deaths. At an event in 2022, Gates suggested the foundation would last another 25 years. But the new announcement of the 2045 date is a much more definitive embrace of “time-limited philanthropy.”
So this could be a pivotal moment for the norms surrounding philanthropic timing. We are living in a period defined by cascading crises: climate, racial justice, COVID, and now those related to the Trump administration’s budget cuts. In response to each, a handful of foundations have significantly increased their spending rates; some have committed to spending down their assets.
It is also a period characterized by the proliferation of high-profile billion-dollar philanthropic pledges from individual donors. These are timely in that they attract immediate public and media attention but have not necessarily translated into the timely disbursement of philanthropic funds. In recent years, Mackenzie Scott has drawn considerable attention—and for a moment rivaled Gates as the nation’s most prominent public philanthropist—with the speed and urgency with which she embraced the challenge of directing her fortune to philanthropy. She has given about $19 billion over the last five years, though she has struggled to keep up with the relentless pace of compounding interest and Amazon’s rising stock; her total wealth has barely budged since then.
Taking it all together, then, there is still a significant shift toward giving now in philanthropy. Could Gates’s announcement help precipitate one? If it does, Gates will spotlight another major debate within the philanthropic sector. One of the most important of these relates to a core paradox of contemporary philanthropy, which boils down to the old joke: “The food here is terrible—and the portions are too small!”
Along with demands for more and faster giving, there are concerns about the ways in which mega-philanthropy can distort democratic norms and institutions. Gates is not only one of the most recognized and famous philanthropists but also one of the most criticized in these terms.
If the surge of giving that will come from the Gates Foundation aligns with democratic demands—if, for example, it can help shift power to local communities and institutions—that may well be as important for building the next generation of philanthropic norms as questions of scale and pace.