In a world where governments are retreating from the frontlines of global aid, billionaires are accelerating their exit strategies—and their philanthropy. But why now?
Earlier this month, Bill Gates made a quiet but seismic announcement: the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private philanthropic organization, will shut its doors by 2045. That’s a full decade earlier than previously expected. The goal? Spend nearly $200 billion—essentially the rest of Gates’s fortune—before then.
It’s a significant move. Not just for the sheer scale of the money involved, but because it signals a deeper shift in the psychology of wealth, power, and urgency.
Because Gates isn’t alone.
MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has already given away more than $19 billion in just a few years, cutting massive checks to small, often overlooked nonprofits with minimal bureaucracy. She doesn’t even have a foundation. No multi-year grant cycles. No PR roadshows. Just, here’s the money—do something with it.
And it’s not just individuals. According to the National Center for Family Philanthropy, the percentage of American family foundations choosing to “spend down”—that is, intentionally give away all their assets within a set period—has risen from 9% to 13% in just the past decade. That may seem small, but in the historically glacial world of philanthropy, it’s a marked acceleration.
The Question Behind the Trend: Why the Rush?
At first glance, it looks like altruism speeding up. But peer a little closer, and the reasons are more complicated—and perhaps, more unsettling.
For starters, governments are doing less. Foreign aid budgets are shrinking. Social services are fraying. The OECD reports that global foreign aid actually fell by 0.5% in 2023, even as conflicts, climate disasters, and global displacement surged.
That leaves a growing vacuum—one that private capital is increasingly expected to fill. Whether it should or not is a separate question. But the pressure is there.
Then there’s the existential math of the moment. Climate change, global pandemics, AI disruption, democracy in retreat—everywhere you look, the challenges feel massive, fast-moving, and tightly interconnected. For philanthropists who genuinely believe their money can improve the world, waiting doesn’t make sense. As one advisor to ultra-wealthy donors put it: “If you believe time is short, then giving becomes a race against the clock.”
A Different Kind of Legacy
Traditionally, legacy meant permanence. Andrew Carnegie’s foundations, John D. Rockefeller’s charitable trusts—many of these institutions were built to last forever. But the new generation of mega-donors are flipping that script. They want to solve problems, not steward wealth. And that means spending it—not preserving it.
It’s a shift from institutional philanthropy to impact-first giving.
In a 2023 interview, Gates said something striking: “There’s no rule that says you should keep money sitting in a bank for 100 years while people are dying of malaria now.” It’s blunt, even slightly jarring. But it captures the mindset. Why accumulate interest when you could be saving lives?
But There’s a Catch
Still, this trend raises uncomfortable questions. For one: Should so much global progress depend on the whims of billionaires?
This is where things get murky. Because while it’s true that philanthropy can be catalytic—fast, experimental, risk-tolerant in ways governments often can’t be—it’s also true that it’s unaccountable. Billionaires don’t answer to voters. Their choices aren’t debated in parliaments. And there’s no mechanism, really, for the public to push back when priorities are set behind closed doors.
Some critics argue that even the most well-meaning philanthropy can distort public agendas. Take education reform in the U.S., where large-scale philanthropic investments have, at times, clashed with community needs. Or the COVID-19 response, where private sector involvement raised ethical questions around access, transparency, and control.
So while speedy giving may feel like progress, it also quietly underscores a broken system—where solving global problems increasingly relies on personal fortune, not public will.
The Bigger Picture
Zoom out far enough, and this story isn’t just about billionaires and their bank accounts.
It’s about the reconfiguration of global responsibility. Governments, once the main actors in fighting poverty, disease, and inequality, are retreating. And into that space steps private wealth—faster, nimbler, but also less democratic.
So yes, the rise of “give while you live” is encouraging. It’s good to see the richest among us moving money with more urgency. But it also invites a sharper question: What happens when the safety nets of the future depend not on policy, but on philanthropy? And what do we do when those nets disappear—along with the foundations that built them?
There’s something admirable in the desire to give it all away. But if we don’t ask why the giving feels so urgent, we may be missing the point.
Written for The Hopinion
Because spoon-fed narratives won’t change the world.
