Dushime Gashugi is a bit of a stuntman. Every July, for five of the past nine years, Gashugi has flown or driven more than 800 miles from the east of Los Angeles, where he lives, to the small resort town of Sun Valley in Idaho. There, he lolls about, hoping to grab the attention of a billionaire or two as they swoop in from all over the world in their private jets for an annual confab dubbed the “summer camp for billionaires.”
In 2017, Gashugi stood by the side of a road with an enormous sign that read: MESSRS. BLOOMBERG & GATES: ENTREPRENEUR FROM CA SEEKS ADVICE. COFFEE’S ON ME. He added his number at the bottom of the sign, which he had printed at a shop near his home and stuffed into his car, pulling down its backseat to be able to do so. Four years later, in 2021, he paid $1,500 to rent a spacesuit from WonderWorks, a California company that builds replicas of space shuttles and other gear for movie studios and theme parks. Gashugi, who was working as a real estate agent at the time, squeezed his six-foot four-inch frame into the 30-pound suit as he stood by the roadside once again, holding another giant sign. This time, he hoped to catch the attention of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who is commercializing space travel through Blue Origin, his aerospace company. In 2019, Bezos had shown off a four-legged moon lander that Blue Origin was building, which he said could deliver cargo and humans to the moon’s surface by 2024. JEFF BEZOS, SEEKING MOON COLONY LISTINGS. CAN SPEAK KLINGON. LET’S HAVE DINNER, the sign read.
Sun Valley, at an elevation of nearly 6,000 feet, is nestled at the foot of Bald Mountain, whose slopes fill with wildflowers in the summer and skiers in the winter. For the past forty or so years, it has been the venue for one of the most high-profile gatherings of billionaires and luminaries from the worlds of media, entertainment, and technology, where some of America’s richest and most powerful executives gather to plot takeovers or exchange views about the state of the world over rounds of golf or quiet walks. Held at the Sun Valley Lodge—which, when it was built in 1936 in the style of an Austrian ski resort, was intended as a destination for celebrities and wealthy families—the conference, hosted by the New York investment bank Allen & Co., has long attracted media attention. Although the guest list is a closely guarded secret, it’s not hard to spot the business moguls as they stroll the walking paths that wind around the lodge, or hitch rides on golf carts to get around. The dress code is informal, the atmosphere relaxed. Reporters and photographers are not invited to the conference, but they are tolerated if they maintain a respectful distance from the guests. Many attendees, however, are at ease and like to be accessible, so they often pose for photographs or stop to answer questions. Gates and Buffett are regulars, as are the media barons Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Bloomberg and top executives from the world of technology like Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; Sundar Pichai of Alphabet; and Elon Musk of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, now known as X.
Gashugi first heard about the Sun Valley conference in 2010, not long after he graduated from the University of Chicago, where he majored in economics. The son of Rwandan immigrants, Gashugi was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, but grew up in Berrien Springs, Michigan, a village of about 1,800 people where the boxer Muhammad Ali once owned a home. Berrien Springs sits in a prairie, attracting local visitors for its nature park. With just two traffic lights, it might be a pitstop to elsewhere. His father came to the United States in 1965 as a Watutsi dancer for the New York World’s Fair. He spoke no English and carried only his high school transcript, hoping to make a life for himself in America. He eventually enrolled in a PhD program at Boston University. The family moved to Berrien Springs after he secured a teaching job at Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist institution. Gashugi’s mother came to the United States to study nursing, sponsored by missionaries, and found work as a nurse practitioner at a VA hospital. Outside the university’s cocoon of diversity, the population of Berrien Springs is largely white; in 2020, more than half of the county voted for Donald Trump.
Gashugi and his sister grew up in a modest but comfortable home in what he described as a “Christian setting.” After college, the idea of a conventional path, say an MBA degree or a career in finance or academia, sounded boring to Gashugi. Relentless and restless, he had long itched to do something entrepreneurial. Success stories entranced him. He wanted to know how successful and powerful people approached business, and what he could learn from them. Gashugi speaks in torrents. He jumps from point to point, idea to idea, as if dashing across an imaginary whiteboard, marker in hand, scribbling furiously. He studs his sentences with references to Bezos, to Musk. One fall afternoon in 2022, he sat at a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan dressed in a bright red polo shirt and blue jeans, insisting that he had a plan but was too coy to share it. A copy of Shoe Dog, a memoir written by Phil Knight, the billionaire cofounder of Nike, lay on the table.
At Chicago, Gashugi had been a research assistant to Gary Becker, the renowned economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 for his groundbreaking approach to economics as a study of everyday human behavior. Gashugi recalled that Becker, who died in 2014, had once compared the ability to take risks to fertility: Both can diminish with age. Risks become harder to take as you grow older, the professor said, because life gets more complicated as mortgages and children enter the picture, and so on. Gashugi took that lesson to heart. If he wanted to become an entrepreneur, he would have to start taking his chances immediately. And he needed to learn from the best, by approaching influential people directly to learn about their principles and the lessons they had learned on their way to the top, and how he too could get to a position of power, wealth, and influence. “You can’t become like people if you don’t hang around them,” Gashugi insisted. “You can’t become a millionaire if you’re hanging around with broke people.”
At 22, he gave himself a decade to pursue the dream. But where to start? Buffett seemed like a good bet. The billionaire investor had bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 when it was a small textile manufacturer and used it as a vehicle to build an enormous conglomerate that owned everything from insurance to ice cream. He would know something about building a business. In the first week of July 2010, Gashugi flew to Buffett’s hometown of Omaha on a one-way ticket, with the aim of securing a meeting with the billionaire and convincing him to give him an internship. But he soon learned that Buffett was out of town, and a quick Google search revealed that the investor was at a conference in Sun Valley.
Once Gashugi learned that the Sun Valley conference was a meeting place for billionaires, he set about researching the event. As he learned more, marveling at slideshows of the celebrity attendees on various news sites, he hit upon a crazy idea: Why not go to Sun Valley during the conference? It would be the most efficient way to get in front of as many billionaires as possible, so that he could ask them about their rules for success and apply them to his own life. “I don’t have the money to go all over God’s creation, so what’s the most systematic way to find people?”
Gashugi bet that people would stop to talk to him, knowing that anyone showing up uninvited at Sun Valley would have gone to great lengths to get there. The airport closest to the lodge is in Hailey, about a half-an-hour’s drive away. “At that level you have to respect a certain level of audacity,” Gashugi said to himself. “You’re a Black kid crashing a conference in Idaho.”
When he got to Sun Valley the first time, in 2015, his mouth fell agape. “It’s an out of body experience. Everyone who you can imagine is there,” he said. He has since been to Sun Valley at least five times. In 2022, when he couldn’t attend, Gashugi hired an aerial banner pilot to fly a banner over the conference for two hours, targeting Bezos and Musk. In 2016, his enthusiasm got the better of him, as he chased after attendees indiscriminately, often pestering them with questions. The July week of the conference, two Black men, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, had been fatally shot by police in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, respectively. Amid protests about race and criminal justice, a sniper had shot and killed five white police officers in downtown Dallas. When Gashugi, dressed in a colorful dashiki, showed up at the Sun Valley Lodge, security officers were on high alert and ordered him not to trespass. Only later did he learn that photos of the sniper wearing a dashiki were circulating online, and he wondered if the officers were especially worried because of the coincidence. “That spooked me good.” The following year, he returned with a plan. He created lists and stationed himself at strategic points around the resort—far enough that the security guards wouldn’t have to shoo him away, but visible to the attendees. He had read enough billionaire memoirs and company reports so that he could go up to someone with a specific question. Over the years, he approached dozens of billionaires and executives, with a version of the same question: “What are your habits for success?” Most of the people he approached were nice and unassuming when he struck up a conversation with them. “If I didn’t know they were billionaires… it’s counterintuitive that the richer you are, the higher up you are, the nicer you are.”
Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai seemed like a “very nice guy.” Bill Gates was “not very nice,” because he didn’t stop to entertain Gashugi’s entreaties. Gashugi took a selfie with Jorge Paulo Lemann, the billionaire cofounder of 3G Capital, a private equity firm that owned a piece of the branded food giant Kraft Heinz. In 2017, just days after he held out a sign asking Bloomberg to call him, he woke up to a voicemail message from the former mayor of New York himself. A conference attendee had taken a photo of Gashugi’s sign, on which he had scrawled his number, and sent it to Bloomberg. “I thought I’d give you the courtesy of a call,” Bloomberg said in the voicemail message, which Gashugi saved. He said he would call again the following Monday, which he did. “How can I help?” As the two got to talking, it seemed to Gashugi that the billionaire, who made his money selling financial information to Wall Street firms, was genuinely interested in hearing about his background and offering his advice. Unnerved and trembling with excitement, Gashugi asked Bloomberg for tips for entrepreneurial success: how to build a team, how to raise money, and how to develop as a leader. Over time, Gashugi would ask for the same advice from the other billionaires who stopped to talk to him. The Sun Valley visits turned out to be what Gashugi called his continuing education. He became a bit of a local celebrity after he got written up by the Idaho Mountain Express for his stunts.1 He even appeared on CNBC. That’s when he realized that he could build a following by marketing himself: Stunts would bring him publicity, which he hoped to then leverage into building his business, no matter what the venture. As of 2024, Gashugi had no plans to give up his annual sojourn to Sun Valley, and neither did he plan to pull back on unusual public displays meant to draw attention. (He once crashed the sets of the Today show in another rented spacesuit to pitch himself as the first Realtor for Musk’s planned colony on Mars.) He was also focused on getting a celebrity or a billionaire to endorse him, even willing to be a nuisance. “Money follows attention,” he said. Sometimes, Gashugi wonders if he could be a “Black Rockefeller.” Success in sports and entertainment was expected of Black people, he said, but there weren’t many in the corporate world. “No one can tell me I can’t be a billionaire, or that I can’t do something.”
The wealthy have always been among us. We are entranced by the stories of how they came about their wealth. Like Gashugi, we want to learn about their paths to success, and how to emulate them. In a capitalist society built on the idea that material success is the inevitable outcome of individual merit and boundless opportunity, those at the top of the economic ladder would appear to hold all the secrets. We tend to uphold the wealthy as ideals, attributing to them valor, virtue, integrity, and brilliance. “Money ennobles rich people, and corrupts poor people,” the essayist and editor Lewis Lapham, himself born into a wealthy family, once observed, although he dismissed the idea as “humbug.”2
It’s therefore no surprise that books, articles, and blogs abound that purport to distill the life experiences and stories of the rich into pithy, plug-and-play principles. University courses on business and entrepreneurship—pitched as a proxy for, and a route to, wealth—entice students by promising to equip them with the tools for success. The desire to get rich is partly what draws thousands of starry-eyed, ambitious youngsters to Wall Street and Silicon Valley every year. It’s what prompts a schoolteacher to plunk her life savings into the cryptocurrency market and an immigrant to leave his family behind for a chance in America. But if wealth has always existed, whether through the accumulation of land, property, or currency, or simply in relation to the impoverishment of others, the term “billionaire” is a later construct. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary traces its origins to 1844 in American English, and it became more common at the beginning of the twentieth century—a direct consequence of the explosion in wealth during the Gilded Age, when the term “millionaire” no longer sufficed. John D. Rockefeller Sr. is often considered the country’s first billionaire, amassing an enormous fortune of $1.2 billion in 1918 dollars—about $24 billion today—from his oil empire.
The term came into its own in the 1980s, when the current cycle of wealth creation began, aided by the unusual confluence of technological innovation, financial engineering, and supportive government policies.3 In that sense, the popularization of the word “billionaire” itself has become a metonym of sorts for the growing wealth disparity we have witnessed in recent decades. As billionaires become more numerous, more prominent, and more influential, they have become objects of fascination and wonder. We are united by a cultural voyeurism of billionaires, wondering what it would be like to live in their mansions with their armies of attendants; laze on their superyachts that float on international waters beyond the reach of nation-states; buy an entire company or an island on a whim; have a net worth larger than the GDP of some countries. Seen as the rock stars of capitalism and some of our biggest celebrities, billionaires make news not only for their fortunes—often numbers that are so enormous as to be unfathomable—but for their personal affairs, their physical transformations, their romances and dalliances, their purchases of sports teams and art at auction, their investments, their political contributions and their philanthropy, and even the number of children they have. They are both Emerson’s singular figures and Byron’s romantic heroes. It is hardly surprising that billionaires are revered in a country that worships wealth. If monarchs throughout history, including in England before the Enlightenment, claimed a divine right to kingship as a way of retaining their grip on power, we have willingly conferred near divinity on our billionaires.
In 1892, Ward McAllister, a lawyer who sometimes served as a social director for Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the high priestess of New York society during the Gilded Age, published a list of the 400 most influential people in the city in The New York Times.4 That was the inspiration for Malcolm Forbes, the editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, when he asked his reporters in 1981 to find the 400 richest people in America. Forbes, who had inherited the small family publication from his father, was intent on transforming it into a global brand synonymous with wealth, capitalism, and entrepreneurship. In 1982, the magazine published its first Forbes 400 list, kickstarting an annual tradition. That year, Forbes had 13 billionaires on its list of the richest Americans. Fifteen years later, the number of billionaires had shot up to 170, and a person needed to have assets of at least $475 million to make the cut. In 2021, all 400 were billionaires, and the twelve people at the bottom of the list were tied, each with a net worth of $2.9 billion. Every year, the list of billionaires whose fortunes don’t make the cut gets longer. Since 1987, Forbes has also published an annual list of the world’s billionaires; at last count, there were more than 2,600 people around the globe with estimated fortunes of at least one billion dollars.5
Rising wealth has given birth to an entire cottage industry of wealth tracking in America, where, in addition to Forbes, companies like Wealth-X and Bloomberg, through its Billionaires Index, calculate, quantify, rank, and track in real time the changing fortunes of billionaires, how they were sourced, whether they are “self-made,” and how generous they are in terms of giving that fortune away. These lists are inexact but directionally accurate. Wealth managers subscribe to them so that they can target their services. Journalists, academics, and policymakers regularly cite them, especially the Forbes list. A search for “how to become a billionaire” on Google produces an infinite scroll of results, not all of them facetious. Investopedia, a site dedicated to financial information and advice, lists the do’s and don’ts of becoming a billionaire. Amazon sells books offering strategies for making billions—essentially get-rich-quick lists upgraded to meet the moment. It also offers a broad selection of popular books about billionaires, from hagiographies to critical portrayals.
Even fictional billionaires, from Bruce Wayne, a.k.a. Batman (Forbes pegged his wealth at about $7 billion, although some fans put it at $100 billion, based on a DC Comics story plot) to Christian Grey (estimated net worth of $2.2 billion), the protagonist in Fifty Shades of Grey, are cult figures—one heroic and virtuous, the other kinky and chivalrous. The latter, an erotic love story between Grey, a young Harvard dropout turned billionaire, and a literature student, has sold tens of millions of copies since its 2011 publication, making author E. L. James a millionaire. It turns out that romance novels involving billionaires are a thing. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, the journalist Lydia Kiesling discovers that a search for “billionaire romance” on Amazon Books yields more than 50,000 results. It would appear, Kiesling writes, that “the only kind of book for which ‘billionaire’ is an explicit category is the romance novel, where it has developed into its own distinct subgenre.”6 Kiesling’s essay was part of an entire issue that the magazine ran in April 2022 devoted to money, where writers examined the good, the bad, and the ugly of our fixation with billionaires.
And then there are the books that real-life billionaires have penned about themselves, where they share the insights gleaned on their way to the top. Dozens of superrich men and—a few—women, from Ray Dalio to Oprah Winfrey, have written memoirs detailing their life stories. It is a popular category with readers: Dalio’s book Principles has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide since its 2017 release. Sam Walton’s memoir Made in America, in which he charts his business journey from a single five-and-dime store to the Wal-Mart empire, remains an international bestseller some 30 years after it was first published in 1992. Some are better written than others, and many employ ghost writers, but the themes are common to many of them. The constant messaging is that their fortunes are the byproduct of what they loved to do, and that they got fantastically wealthy because they worked hard and added value to society. Asked about their reaction to billionaires in a June 2022 survey of American voters conducted by RealClear Opinion Research, 63 percent said they admired them or wanted to be them.7 (Another 28 percent said they didn’t think anyone should amass that kind of wealth, or that they outright hated billionaires.)
When talking about their stories, billionaires often underscore that their success is proof of the American dream. In July 2020, a House judiciary panel summoned the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Meta to answer questions about the business tactics that led to their dominance. Just years earlier, the same companies were heralded for their innovation. But the mood was darkening amid reports of their overwhelming dominance and alleged anticompetitive behavior, and their potential misuse and lack of oversight of consumer data. Lawmakers from both parties grilled the executives for more than five hours. Each executive—in addition to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Tim Cook of Apple were present, and all testified over video conference because of the pandemic—expressed humility. In his introductory remarks, Bezos sketched out his life story, speaking of the hard circumstances of his upbringing and how his parents instilled in him and his siblings that anything was possible with hard work and determination. From his grandfather, he took a lesson: If you have a setback, you keep trying until you invent your way to a better place. Those early lessons in entrepreneurial risk-taking came in handy when he left a cushy Wall Street job to start Amazon in a garage in the mid-1990s, Bezos said.8 He also spoke at length about Amazon’s contributions to the economy, how it had revolutionized online retail, helped equip small businesses for success using its technology, and the programs it created to serve underrepresented and underprivileged communities. He ended on a patriotic note, casting America as a country where rags-to-riches stories are possible, where risk-taking and entrepreneurship are welcome, and where immigrants like his adoptive father, who escaped Fidel Castro’s Cuba, can make a home. “It’s not a coincidence that Amazon was born in this country,” Bezos told the lawmakers. “More than any other place on Earth, new companies can start, grow, and thrive here in the U.S…. We nurture entrepreneurs and start-ups with stable rule of law, the finest university system in the world, the freedom of democracy, and a deeply accepted culture of risk-taking.” Zuckerberg claimed for himself a similar narrative at the hearing, highlighting the uniquely American trajectory of Meta, Facebook’s parent company. “Facebook is a successful company now, but we got there the American way: [W]e started with nothing and provided better products that people find valuable.”9
By weaving their personal stories into the stories of their companies, Bezos and Zuckerberg were simply doing what many others of their ilk had done before them: They were selling the American dream. Foundational to the country, the American dream loosely holds that in a land of liberty, boundless opportunity, and free enterprise, individual merit, hard work, and a sprinkling of luck are the keys that unlock fortune. Your dream might be a car and a suburban home, or it might be a palace and a private plane, but it is a vision of upward mobility, of betterment, of easier and fuller lives for your progeny. In a society organized around the individual, the American dream is often cast as aspirational but achievable—and entirely self-made. The dream is at the heart of how Americans embrace our history and how we tell our stories. It is also America’s pitch to the world, drawing immigrants from all over. The idea is constantly sold in popular culture and invoked in defense of the free market that has made the United States the richest country in the world. In signing the Giving Pledge, the initiative launched in 2010 by Buffett, Gates, and French Gates to encourage their fellow billionaires to commit to giving at least half of their fortunes away during their lifetimes or at death, dozens of the country’s wealthiest men and women cite their success stories as the American dream come true. Many describe humble beginnings and fairy-tale endings. In speeches and memoirs, they talk of doing part-time jobs to pay for college, of growing up in immigrant households where the parents scraped and saved to send their children to school, of failure and perseverance. It is a message of empowerment, intended to tell listeners and readers that it is within a person’s power to change their circumstances and achieve the outcomes they desire.
That American success stories would be self-made is a no-brainer given the very basis of the country’s founding. Still, it would take roughly a century after the Declaration of Independence for the “self-made” pitch to become a distinct component of the American dream. The Gilded Age, a term coined by Mark Twain to describe the shine without and the rot within, was a period of roughly three decades beginning in 1870 when some enormous fortunes were made. Andrew Carnegie arrived in America from Scotland as a poor boy, educated himself at night school, and went from a factory worker in a mill to building a steel empire. Cornelius Vanderbilt, the son of a humble family from Staten Island, New York, got his start as a sailboat ferryman and used his entrepreneurial skills to build a steamship business, before turning to railroads and building a giant company. John D. Rockefeller Sr. built an oil monopoly before it was broken up by the federal government. Jay Gould, also born into poverty, did battle with Vanderbilt for control of railroads. John Pierpont Morgan was financier to many of them.
Their riches symbolized the opportunities of a world where the self-made man, and not an inheritor of wealth or an aristocrat, was at the top. The newly wealthy might not have the social status of old money, but they had the ambition and the money to muscle their way into polite society—a tension that is at the heart of The Gilded Age, a highly rated show on HBO. Although they were sometimes unscrupulous, crushing the competition, buying off willing politicians, and breaking up labor unions, the extreme success of the “robber barons”—a term that first appeared in The Atlantic in 1870—only underscored the American values of individualism and hard work, reinforcing the promise and possibility of the new world. A self-made success story was compelling, but it became profoundly emotional when it involved characters who survived the odds and hit paydirt with little more than luck and mettle—a storyline popularized by Horatio Alger, a minister who became a prolific author of books for young boys. By placing the individual at the center of his or her own destiny, the Alger stories provided succor and hope during a period of great wealth disparity. By one estimate alone, the 4,000 richest families in 1897, or about one percent of the population, had as much wealth as the collective monetary worth of 11.6 million families.10
More than two centuries after the robber barons held us in their thrall, there is perhaps no group with more power over our imaginations than today’s technology billionaires. People often rationalize fortunes with value creation: A billionaire deserves his or her wealth because the individual created something of value for the wider world, and the wealth is proportional to the value created. But because technological innovations and inventions have prompted so many major cultural shifts and altered our daily lives, we see the people who built tech companies as even more deserving than the wealth that accrues to billionaires in, say, finance. If anything, the immense wealth of tech billionaires, the thinking goes, is dwarfed by the social, economic, and scientific progress they have created. Moreover, wealth creation in technology is seen as not a zero-sum game but an uplift for all members of society.
If the acquisition of money is an American fixation, so is giving it away. Americans give away more money than any other country in the world. They give to religious organizations, hospitals, schools and universities, arts and culture, nonprofits working for animal rights, and activists defending the right to abortion, among other causes. Some give because of their family values or religious beliefs. Others give as an expression of gratitude or a sense of civic duty. Deeply held beliefs about right and wrong spur people to send money to causes dear to them. Those who cannot part with their dollars give of their time. Individuals collectively give more money to charitable causes than foundations, corporations, and bequests combined, according to research by Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, which publishes an annual report called Giving USA, even though the numbers change from year to year. High inflation, an underperforming stock market, and a lethargic economy hurt giving, while global turmoil, political strife, and environmental catastrophes spur giving. Contributions flowed into nonprofits when the superstorm Sandy flooded lower Manhattan in 2012 and again when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020. Abortion clinics received an influx of dollars in 2022 after the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to an abortion. Nonprofits working on gender equality and sexual abuse saw a jump in donations after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. Jeannie Infante Sager, the former director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University, said such “rage giving” was mostly made up of small-dollar donations from women. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when the stock market soared and the healthcare system was overwhelmed, philanthropic gifts broke new records. In 2022, as the pandemic receded and inflation became a greater worry, fewer people gave money away—although in dollar terms, the $319 billion amount was still higher than in 2019.11
The word “philanthropy” has its roots in Greek, and simply translates to “a love of humanity.” The way we understand it today means using private resources for public good. The freedom to give voluntarily to whatever causes you want to, for whatever reason you pick, can be seen as a pure, uncoerced expression of individual liberty, and even an exercise of democracy. The tradition of philanthropy thus plays into the myth of American individualism, said Elizabeth Dale, who teaches nonprofit leadership at Seattle University. Through the ages, philanthropy has been “part of the American tradition of wanting to make it separate from government—that people could make their own decisions about how to use their own resources,” Dale said.
Philanthropy, or at least a version of it, has a long tradition in American public life. Amanda B. Moniz, a historian and curator of philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, divides the history of voluntary giving in America into five distinct phases that align roughly with the country’s evolution, starting with the missionary organizations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and tax-funded, local mechanisms for providing relief to the poor.12 After the American Revolution, she notes in her article “Giving in America: A History of Philanthropy,” residents of the newly formed nation took a more universal approach to charitable giving, moving away from religion, ethnicity, and other groupings to distribute aid to anyone in need. In the 1800s, Americans embraced charity with a nationalistic fervor, forming associations like the American Bible Society and other entities dedicated to social reform. It was this fervor that caught the eye of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French historian, on his nine-month journey through America. Writing in Democracy in America, Tocqueville observed that nineteenth-century Americans formed not just political associations, “but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.”13 By the late nineteenth century, the industrialists of the Gilded Age, their pockets bulging with new fortunes, introduced a more ambitious philanthropy, funding the country’s cultural and educational institutions. With America’s global clout growing, international charitable giving also grew. “World War I marked the first time Americans gave on a mass scale for foreign humanitarian relief,” Moniz writes in “Giving in America.” In the past five or so decades, as philanthropy has become a vast professional enterprise, the causes people pick have turned personal rather than national or universal, according to her.
Ever since he began to make money about four decades ago, Joel L. Fleishman has put away a portion of his paycheck for philanthropy. Initially, Fleishman set aside about 10 percent when his paycheck as an academic was relatively paltry, but over time he increased it to 30 percent. “It has made it so much easier to give away money because I overcame the reluctance early on about whether I should spend the money on myself rather than give it away,” said Fleishman, a professor of law and public policy at Duke University, who also leads its center for strategic philanthropy and civil society. He said charity was an important part of his life, partly because of his religious beliefs. He gives to a variety of causes—to end child hunger, in support of relief to poor countries, to organizations serving the Black community. In addition, Fleishman set up a foundation in his parents’ memory. But he admitted that giving money away is an acquired habit, like a late riser adjusting to a 5 A.M. wake up, or a meat lover adopting a vegan diet. To Fleishman, the nonprofit sector in America is dynamic because individuals and groups are free to give money to whatever they want to give to if they comply with the requirements of the law. Unlike in France, Germany, or Japan, where individuals require government approval to contribute money to things that the state deems within its purview, such as education, philanthropy is a free activity in America. “The great strength of the nonprofit sector has been that individuals can start foundations and give money to what they consider good ideas,” Fleishman often tells his students.
Sometimes, an individual’s impetus for giving is awakened by “mass philanthropy” campaigns; an early twentieth-century example is the March of Dimes in 1938, which raised collections from millions of Americans to fund polio research. The March relied on radio advertising, Hollywood celebrities, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who founded the organization, to get the word out. Even the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was crowdfunded.14 The publisher of The New York World, Joseph Pulitzer, put out an advertisement in his paper after funds for the construction of the base ran out. The ad brought in more than $100,000 in donations within six months, allowing the pedestal to be completed. Most of the contributions were a dollar or less. The same impetus that brought together Americans of earlier eras to form groups and start or fund institutions is echoed in the modern-day campaigns of online mass giving. Take the Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014. Initially dreamed up as a way to create awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, it became both a social media stunt and a viral campaign that succeeded in raising small-dollar donations from millions of people, who recorded themselves pouring a bucket of ice water over their heads, posting it on social media, and challenging another person to do the same, or donate $100 to the ALS Association (or do both). Celebrities and big philanthropists got involved in the challenge. The campaign eventually raised $115 million for the association, far outstripping the amounts it had raised in previous years, allowing it to direct much larger amounts to ALS research. Another online charity movement, GivingTuesday, started in 2012 to encourage people to make charitable donations one day a year, traditionally on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. GivingTuesday now calls itself a “global generosity movement.”
Individual philanthropy is also directed through corporations, which encourage generosity by offering company matches. At Microsoft, which applies its competitive culture even to donations, groups pit themselves against each other to see who raises more money. Managers offer prizes such as a dinner with the boss as incentives for employees to donate more. Once, a manager had to shave his head because he said he would do so if his team raised a certain amount. Buffett tipped his hat to this kind of philanthropy when he wrote in 2021: “Those who give their love and time in order to directly help others… receive no recognition whether they mentor the young, assist the elderly or devote precious hours to community betterment. They do not have buildings named after them, but they silently make those establishments—schools, hospitals, churches, libraries, whatever—work smoothly to benefit those who have received the short straws in life.”15 He made similar observations in his Giving Pledge letter in 2010: “First, my pledge: More than 99% of my wealth will go to philanthropy during my lifetime or at death. Measured by dollars, this commitment is large. In a comparative sense, though, many individuals give more to others every day. Millions of people who regularly contribute to churches, schools, and other organizations thereby relinquish the use of funds that would otherwise benefit their own families. The dollars these people drop into a collection plate or give to United Way mean forgone movies, dinners out, or other personal pleasures. In contrast, my family and I will give up nothing we need or want by fulfilling this 99% pledge.”16
Small-dollar donations are mostly a reflection of pure generosity by individuals. It’s therefore not surprising that philanthropy by the billionaire class is also seen as unadulterated generosity, except that it is supercharged. In 2022, very large gifts by individuals represented 5 percent of the nearly $500 billion that Americans gave to charity, according to the annual Giving USA report, and “mega-giving” by six individuals and couples alone totaled $14 billion.17 Another study found that donations of more than $1 million accounted for 11 percent of the total number of donations, but measured by the number of dollars, they constituted 40 percent. As of the end of 2021, the top 25 U.S. billionaires had given away $169 billion as a group over their lifetimes.18
Hundreds of cultural centers, hospitals, museums, libraries, university departments, nonprofits, media organizations, and other entities have benefited from billionaire dollars, and that munificence is often recorded via news releases, articles, and renamed departments and institutions. In return for his $100 million gift to the New York Public Library, the private equity billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman had his name inscribed on several of the library’s iconic buildings. The Schwarzman naming spree irked at least one critic, who called it “crass.”19 Of his decision to buy a copy of the Magna Carta at auction, his fellow private equity billionaire David M. Rubenstein wrote in 2010 that he had bought it to keep the document in American hands.20 He had the option to do so anonymously, but “I decided, though, that I wanted the public to know right then that I intended to place the document on long-term loan to the National Archives as a gift to the country and as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.”
To question billionaire philanthropy as anything other than noble, especially given its imprint on the social and cultural firmament, is akin to doubting the intentions of a soldier who goes into battle to save his country. Yet, the reasons for giving billions of dollars away are more complicated and can range from the moral to the merely expedient.21 For those at the very top, philanthropic giving is often determined by a complicated calculus that, in addition to generosity, involves death, taxes, markets, egoism, and reputation. Decades of policy changes around death taxes (also known as estate or inheritance taxes), income taxes, and charitable deductions from those taxes have often controlled the philanthropy spigot. When estate taxes are high, people generally give more to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes and make larger charitable bequests as a means of reducing the taxes their estate will owe. A similar tussle happens between philanthropists and the government when income tax rates rise. The stock market’s performance can also influence how much money is earmarked for giving.
The wealthy typically set up foundations to house their philanthropic dollars and direct those funds, or they put their money into donor-advised funds overseen by big money managers such as Fidelity. Money allocated to charity cannot be reclaimed by the donor, but it can be deducted from the total income on which an individual must pay taxes—an incentive meant to spur giving. Lawmakers, worried that the wealthy were directing big sums of money to their private foundations for the tax breaks without any accountability, passed the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which requires foundations to give away a minimum of 5 percent of their assets annually to maintain their tax-exempt status. Rising wealth has led to an explosion in the number of private foundations and the amount of investment assets they hold. In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, there were more than 100,000 private foundations in the United States. More than $1 trillion sits in their coffers, a greater than fivefold increase from three decades ago.22 Except for dips during the downturns following the 2000 dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 financial crisis, the amount of assets has grown steadily. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of foundations with assets of at least $1 billion doubled, from 65 to 136, according to calculations based on publicly available data by John Seitz, who runs a data organization called FoundationMark. Foundations with assets of between $100 million and $1 billion in assets also doubled over the same period.
Donor-advised funds, which have existed since the 1930s, too have exploded in popularity as wealth has risen. Like foundations, wealthy individuals get the tax benefit of the donation upfront, but unlike foundations, there is no annual disbursement requirement nor a time frame during which the money must make its way to a nonprofit entity. Such funds have become hugely popular in recent years; as of 2021, about $234 billion sat in donor-advised funds, according to the National Philanthropic Trust, which advises foundations, donors, and others.23 That is more than double the $112 billion in assets, including donor contributions and market gains, such funds had in 2017. The number of donor-advised fund accounts has also risen from 471,000 to 1.3 million over the same time frame, introducing some cynicism into whether the noble intentions of philanthropy, as outlined by the government, are being abused.24 Outflows from these funds are usually lower than the contributions people make, meaning that tax calculations are likely a bigger motivator than philanthropy. In 2020, more than $35 billion made its way from donor-advised funds to philanthropic causes—a record, as people were driven to directing the funds to charitable organizations during the pandemic. Still, the inflow of money into donor-advised funds for the year, at about $50 billion, was far higher than the outflow.25 In 2021, when the S&P 500 stock market index hit record highs, the inflows doubled to $72 billion. Payouts also increased, but by a much lower amount, according to the Trust.
Tax incentives aside, many billionaires also give to manage and burnish their reputations. Grand philanthropic gestures acted at least partly as a shield for the Sackler family even as they knowingly fed an opioid addiction crisis around the country, and made billions off selling Oxycontin through their company, Purdue Pharma.26 For years, the Sackler name graced museum wings and art institutes, endowed university chairs, supported medical research and more, and family scions were often seen talking about their family’s philanthropic traditions. (In 2021, following the growing outrage at Purdue’s role in the opioid crisis, the Metropolitan Museum of Art scrubbed the Sackler name from some of its exhibition halls.)27 Many billionaires also give money away because of the diminishing marginal utility of wealth. The media often casts big donations within the framework of selfishness and generosity; a billionaire who chooses to give money when he could have been buying yachts and mansions is seen as having taken the morally correct path. But generosity can be a forced choice. At some point, the relentless march of wealth accumulation—after the appetite for homes, luxury cars, custom-made private planes, yachts, expensive art, sports teams, and islands has been sated, and future generations provided for—brings no new joy. Rather, there is greater joy in giving the money back to society, picking and choosing the ways in which to do so, and building a legacy.
The growth of mega donors, and the overall rise of philanthropic donations by those on the wealthier end of the spectrum, could have potentially deleterious effects on America’s giving culture. First, it skews the sources of funds for nonprofits. If ordinary Americans donate less money to, say, the nonprofit working on getting abortion care to women, it makes that nonprofit more dependent on the few givers at the top. If those mega donors go elsewhere, a nonprofit can suddenly become strapped for cash. The tilt of the field of philanthropy toward big donors also means certain already well-funded areas get more funding, such as top-tier universities and hospitals. Americans’ attitudes toward donations by small donors and mega donors remain mixed. In a 2023 study titled “What Americans Think About Philanthropy and Nonprofits” published by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, respondents “somewhat preferred” a wider base of small donors to a narrower base of mega donors. At the same time, they also agreed that big gifts were more impactful and should be part of the giving landscape.28
Philanthropy experts are becoming concerned about another trend that is being masked by big, splashy billionaire donations: Fewer and fewer everyday Americans and households have been giving money away in recent decades. Even as the overall giving numbers are growing, the number of small donations is falling as a percentage of that total amount.29 “The percentage of Americans giving to charitable organizations has been declining over the past 20 years,” according to the authors of the 2023 report. “This is a key concern inside the sector and regularly garners media attention, as well. Yet only one in three Americans is aware of this key challenge to the future of philanthropy.”