After 15 years, donation commitment gives mixed results

A version of this article appeared for the first time in Inside Wealth Newsletter of CNBC with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the investor and consumer with high shuttle. Register To receive future editions, directly in your reception box.

In June 2010, Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett began what could be described as the most ambitious fundraising campaign in the world. After promising to give the vast majority of their wealth, the trio asked their ultra-rich peers to promise at least half of their assets to charitable works during their lives or in their fields.

In two months, the pledge of donations collected signatures of 40 of the richest families and individuals in America to register. This first batch of Prod, including Michael Bloomberg and David Rockefeller, was announced 15 years ago this week.

In the years that followed, the pledge of donations has lost steam in terms of registration. At the end of 2010, 57 signatories representing around 14% of American billionaires had made the non -binding commitment, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies. Currently, the commitment has commitments of 256 people, couples and families, including 110 American billionaires, according to the gradual reflection group. This group represents 12% of the American billionaire population, according to Forbes.

The annual number of registrations has also reported since this first year. Even in 2020, when the pandemic encouraged the rich donors to give more, the pledge of donations gained only 12 new signatories. Last May, the Pledge welcomed 11 new members, an improvement marked compared to the lowest record of 2024 of four.

Meanwhile, in the past 10 years, the number of billionaires around the world has increased by more than half to 2,891, according to UBS. Their wealth has also doubled by more than half to about 15.7 dollars, said UBS.

“It is disappointing since you hope that more people intensify,” said Chuck Collins, program director at IPS and the Oscar-Fil-Fils with Oscar Mayer meat.

Collins, co-author of the report, said that the rapid increase in wealth could be partly to blame. This increase in wealth has also made it difficult for committers to give their money quickly.

“Some of this is quite sudden, the growth of wealth,” he said, “you have to give people a decade of soft, if you land in the billionaire class to understand it.”

That the pledge of donations has succeeded depends on who you ask. The IPS report described the commitment of donations as “dissatisfied, useless, and not our ticket for a fairer and better future” and has only identified one living couple for having fulfilled the commitment, John and Laura Arnold.

A spokesperson for donation’s commitment described the IPS report as a “misleading” and said that IPS used incomplete data and excluded “important forms of charity”, including gifts to foundations.

“For fifteen years, the pledge of donations has contributed to creating new standards of generosity and becoming a connected and active global learning community,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Wealth.

Collins said that donation’s commitment had a certain merit, describing it as a “community of peers among a group that does not have much peers”.

Amir Pasic, dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy of the University of Indiana, said that it had a lasting impact on the way the rich think of their donations.

“I always think it was a really important attempt to socialize the new wealth that emerged at the beginning of this century,” he said. “We can debate in an interesting way how it has succeeded or has not been, but it has become a characteristic of the high net philanthropic landscape.”

Although registrations for commitments have stagnated, other efforts to accelerate donations have emerged, said Pasic, citing the Blue Meridian collective partners.

And although some billionaires, especially the youngest, can be reluctant to associate with Gates and Buffett, that does not mean that they do not contribute in their own way, said Pasic.

“Buffett is the main representative of new wealth at the start of this century. New representatives have emerged since then,” he said.

According to Collins, impact investment and other alternatives to traditional philanthropy have gained ground, especially among the new class of technological billionaires. He gave the example of OracleLarry Ellison has changed his commitment to concentrate his resources on technological research instead of traditional non -profit organizations.

“I think there is a little more blurred between profit profits and non -profit investment in relation to impact investment,” said Collins.

The venture billionaire Marc Andreessen went so far as to declare that innovative technology – and the amazing of personal wealth in the process – is philanthropic in itself.

“Who gets more value from a new technology, the sole company that does, or millions or billions of people who use it to improve their life? Qed,” he wrote in 2023.

Pasic said it is possible that Bill Gates’ recent commitment to give almost all of his wealth over the next 20 years could bring new urgency to the commitment of donations.

“I think that it remains to be seen,” he said, “that it is ending up being more a kind of private club which becomes less relevant or if it will be the beginning of something wider, gaining new energy in this turbulent period and or generating other types of groups … or other collectives.”