Bill Gates recently announced he would give away virtually all his wealth, over $200 billion, by 2045. Gates has long been known for large-scale good deeds that secured him a unique position among modern billionaires, making him an excellent case study for examining the evolution of billionaire philanthropy. Journalists routinely skewer philanthropic efforts of the ultra-wealthy as self-serving tax schemes, but Gates—with his near-eradication of polio and efforts to halve global infant mortality—has occasionally drawn genuine praise.

His renewed goals for the next 20 years read like humanity’s moonshot checklist: eliminate deadly diseases, end preventable child mortality, eradicate poverty itself. It should have catapulted Gates straight into secular sainthood. But that didn’t happen. The world met his new pledge with familiar awe—especially as the U.S. administration slashed foreign aid funding and Gates stepped in to fill the gap—but also with restraint. Maybe that moderate-at-best optimism reflects the strange moment we’re living in and the deep skepticism we’ve developed as a society toward billionaire philanthropy. After all, the same month Gates announced his give-it-all-away plan, headlines showed the wealthiest growing even richer while most of the world continued to struggle, demonstrating the need for the evolution of billionaire philanthropy.

According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, ending extreme poverty worldwide would cost an estimated $175 billion per year—less than half the amount America’s ten richest individuals gained in personal wealth in 2023 alone. This contrast brings back a familiar, unresolved question: If today’s billionaires give so much, why isn’t the world more equal? Why, with all the foundations, endowments and nods to Andrew Carnegie’s claim that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,” do the rich keep getting richer? And what is this modern ultra-wealthy pursuit of doing good really about? The answer might lie in the language of modern billionaire virtue. This rarefied club doesn’t talk about charity so much as about impact: Success isn’t measured in millions helped but in the scale of transformation promised.

“Philanthropy is always an expression of power,” writer Paul Vallely observed. Today’s billionaires compete not just for profit but for moral authority. When they write those big checks, they’re not speaking to the public. They’re speaking to each other and to history. It’s a kind of high-stakes virtue signaling where the scoreboard is legacy, and the metrics are often conveniently unmeasurable.

Read the full article about the limits of billionaire philanthropy by Vasilisa Kirilochkina at Observer.