Peter Thiel is actively convincing billionaires to abandon The Giving Pledge

[Nick]

Link post

Article in Fortune by Jake Angelo:

https://​​finance.yahoo.com/​​news/​​peter-thiel-actively-convincing-billionaires-174212328.html

[Larks]

The article described Thiel attempting to persuade people to leave the pledge, but not that he has actually succeeded.

[titotal]

This seems like the original article that is being quoted from. The quoted comments seem pretty bleak:

Thiel said he’s nudged a few to erase their signatures. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel said. Notably, in transcripts and audio lectures given by Thiel to Reuters last year, he recalled calling on the world’s richest man and soon-to-be first ever minted trillionaire Elon Musk to retract his pledge, warning the Tesla founder his wealth would go to “left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.”

Thiel said he’s had conversations with some signatories who have expressed uncertainty about their original decisions to commit. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said.

[Matrice Jacobine🔸🏳️‍⚧️]

otoh, this is funny:

Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said. He has his own Epstein ties, but he calls the Pledge an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

[harfe]

warning the Tesla founder his wealth would go to “left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.”

Am I missing something or does this argument make no sense? As far as I can tell, Musk can easily fulfill his giving pledge by giving to his preferred not-left-wing nonprofits without deferring to Bill Gates.

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez 🔹]

I mean… if I were a conservative billionaire, I would be extremely wary about misuse and subversion of the principles that started some foundations (Mellon is the most egregious, but also Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur...) and a few months ago we had in this very forum a discussion, if memory serves, of the terrible philanthropic choices of MacKenzie Scott. While I obviously think it is desirable for billionaires to spend money on effective charity giving, I also feel there’s a reasonable case to be made for that money that would conventionally be routed into philanthropy to do more good if directed toward innovation: sometimes through philanthropy to individuals and early projects, sometimes through investment in companies capable of creating major breakthroughs.

[Julia_Wise🔸]

Seems like a great reason for donors to give during their own lifetimes instead of setting up a long-term foundation.

[Mo Putera]

a few months ago we had in this very forum a discussion, if memory serves, of the terrible philanthropic choices of MacKenzie Scott.

I couldn’t find this discussion, would you mind pointing me to it?

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez 🔹]

Just made a search and, rather embarrassingly, I couldn’t find an actual long discussion in the forum (memory didn’t serve as well as I had thought). I think I conflated the 2 comments of Ian Turner and Jason on this topic (in the forum post The ugly sides of two approaches to charity by Julia Wise from January 13th 2025) with EA-focused criticisms of MacKenzie Scott’s donations from this reddit thread, starting from PEEFsmash’s post:

This is bad and neoliberals should be economically literate enough to know why.

Cost effectiveness of interventions + room for additional funding. Scott is completely disregarding both concepts and giving money to whatever sounds good. Mostly trendy social topics. There will eventually be a book written on Scott’s philanthropy and it will probably have accomplished nothing at all. Would be better off as capital for Bezos to have allocated privately with the intention of profit (Amazon and other Bezos projects will do more total good for humanity than all of Scott’s cockamamey donations do) and the money would certainly do more good via the Gates/​Effective Altruism style of hyper targeting the most cost effective causes, giving to each only as much as they can each deploy, and funding research into high financial risk but high expected return research, both for profit and not-for-profit.

A very enlightening book on these principles: https://​​smile.amazon.com/​​Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Altruism/​​dp/​​1592409660/​​ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=3VU1ZFHVZ0ICE&keywords=doing+good+better&qid=1638468006&sprefix=doing+goo%2Caps%2C93&sr=8-1

[ElliotTep]

I interpreted this as the challenge of setting up a foundation with one purpose in mind, and then the people you hire executing something different because of the values they bring to the table. In general, I’d guess that people who work in philanthropic spaces skew left-wing, and so whatever mandate you set will end up skewing more left-wing than you intend (if you yourself are not left-wing).

[Nithin Ravi🔸]

He was talking about counterfactuals here. I think he’s attempting to convince a lot of right wing billionaires that if they donate to GHD charities for instance than this will cause Bill Gates to redirect some of his GHD money towards left wing nonprofits.

[titotal]

This interpretation is not true. Thiel was talking specifically about money going to Gates in the event of Musk dying:

That’s how Thiel said he persuaded Musk. He said he looked up actuarial tables and found the probability of Musk’s death in the coming year equated to giving $1.4 billion to Gates, who has long sparred with the Tesla CEO.

“What am I supposed to do—give it to my children?” Musk responded, in Thiel’s telling. “You know, it would be much worse to give it to Bill Gates.”

I think this would only make sense if Musk had specifically willed his pledge money to the gates foundation?

[Nithin Ravi🔸]

Huh, thanks for letting me know.

[TimothySpencer]

This is an individual who goes around calling Greta Thunberg the antichrist. I’m not extremely impressed by Thunberg, but I know someone with an ulterior motive who’s playing on people’s fears when I see one. Thiel’s words should not be taken at face-value. He’s not rejecting the effectiveness of giving, he’s rejecting the very concept of good will.

[Mihkel Viires 🔹]

My takeaways from reading the NYT article:

1. Social expectations have (at least in the U.S., which the piece mostly focuses on; it might be a bit different in Europe and other parts of the world) somewhat shifted away from supporting ultra-high-net-worth individuals from doing a lot of philanthropy and doing it publicly. This is sad. We should think if we could somehow help change that. People giving a lot of money to effective causes is something that definitely deserves to be praised and celebrated.

2. There is a lack of accountability for the pledgers. My guess is that Giving Pledge could benefit from scaling up their team significantly to contact and engage donors more regularly. On the other hand, I think society should hold the pledges more to account, and call out people who do not start donating.

Another, less plausible explanation for the slow-down in Giving Pledge sign-ups might be the growth of Founders Pledge in recent years. Some people who would have signed the Giving Pledge in the past might now sign the Founders Pledge instead.^[1] Anecdotal evidence from my own country supports this hypothesis: no person has signed Giving, but four billionaires /​ UHNWIs have signed Founders.

1. ^

   Giving and Founders are not perfect substitutes; Founders also targets early-stage founders who are not yet (ultra) wealthy.)