After 25 years of charitable giving, Melinda French Gates has cemented her reputation as a philanthropist—but she said some of her fellow billionaires aren’t worthy of that title, despite what they say.
In an interview with the New York Times Sunday, French Gates specifically commented on the charitable giving of billionaires like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Block CEO Jack Dorsey, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“They use their voice and they use their megaphones, but I would not call those men philanthropists,” French Gates said.
Dorsey did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent through Block.
Even Ackman and Musk, who have signed the Giving Pledge promising to give away most of their assets, still have work to do, she said, and while each of the billionaires has their own foundation, French Gates said they “have not been very philanthropic yet.”
“Go look at their record of actually giving money to society. It’s not big,” she said.
Ackman did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to the Pershing Square Foundation. Musk did not reply to a request for comment sent to Tesla.
The billionaires, French Gates told the Times, also don’t measure up to the impact that she and her ex-husband Bill Gates, along with Warren Buffett, have made through their decades of altruism.
“So you put Bill and me and Warren in a class of philanthropists doing things in a certain way, but I don’t think you can then say, ‘OK, well, let’s compare to this group over here who are nonphilanthropists.’ Those are nonphilanthropists, in my opinion,” she added.
French Gates cofounded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, soon to be renamed the Gates Foundation, in 2000, and since then she and her now-ex-husband have become the face of philanthropy worldwide. Before she announced in May she was leaving the foundation, she helped oversee more than $77 billion in grant payments to worthy causes over two decades, according to its website.
For their part, the billionaires French Gates called “nonphilantropists” have done plenty of giving in their own way, although some of their causes have been criticized.
Thiel and his foundation are most known for supporting science and entrepreneurship, including through the Thiel Fellowship, a two-year program that gives $100,000 to young people willing to delay or leave college “to build new things.” Some of the program’s most successful alumni include Vitalik Buterin, the creator of the Ethereum blockchain and Dylan Field, the founder of product design platform Figma.
The Thiel Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has donated at least $7.7 billion in Tesla shares to the Musk foundation, yet some of his giving has been criticized as being self-serving. After a SpaceX rocket blew up and scattered debris near its launch site in Cameron County, Texas, Musk announced a $20 million donation to the county’s school district and another $10 million to revitalize the nearby city of Brownsville, the Times reported.
In 2022, the last year for which full data on the Musk Foundation was available, it gave away only 2.25%, or about $157 million, of its $7 billion in assets, the Times found. About half of Musk’s donations from 2021 and 2022 were linked to his employees, his businesses, or himself in some way, according to the Times.
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