For the last quarter-century, Bill Gates has been the donor behind what has long been one of the nation’s largest private philanthropic foundations, a behemoth that has long dwarfed nearly all other charitable institutions.

The Gates Foundation, in its commitment to a large, professionalized staff, driven by quantifiable data, and with its focus on global health, has served as a model for many other donors. And as an individual, Gates has long been the world’s most recognized philanthropist, in terms of media attention, accolades, and public knowledge. As one of the co-founders of the Giving Pledge, the campaign to get the world’s billionaires to donate more than half their wealth to charitable causes, he has also been the individual most closely identified with efforts to shape global philanthropic norms in an age of super-wealth. (Disclosure: I am an employee of the Urban Institute, which receives funding from the Gates Foundation.)

That, in fact, is the best context in which to understand the significance of Gates’s recent announcement that he will give virtually all this wealth to the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years, and that the foundation would “close its doors permanently” by the end of 2045, after all that money has been given away. With Gates’s own wealth listed at north of $100 billion, and his foundation sitting on an endowment of more than $75 billion, Gates estimates that his foundation “will spend more than $200 billion between now and 2045.” As he explained it: “I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned.”

In sheer monetary terms, this pledge, if honored, would be a very big deal. It would require the foundation to maintain an unprecedentedly high level of annual spending, likely doubling its current $9 billion per year. And it would require contemplating a world in which the Gates Foundation no longer exists.

Read the full article about the Gates Foundation shutting down by Benjamin Soskis at Vox.