The new powers in giving
Warren Buffett has joined Bill and Melinda Gates to create the world’s biggest charitable foundation. The hard part will be giving their money away well.
The Economist, 6/29/06
It was an extraordinary sight. The world’s two richest men hugged each other as a room full of New York’s great and good cheered and applauded. The event marked a new sort of partnership, one in which a pair of tycoons will merge their fortunes and give most of their money away to help make the world a better place, especially for the poorest.
In cinema, such a scene would have seemed implausible; especially at a time when businessmen are making headlines for their misdeeds and selfish excess. Yet on June 26th Warren Buffett pledged to donate the bulk of his estimated $44 billion fortune to the charitable foundation created by the only man richer than himself, Bill Gates. This munificence came soon after Mr Gates’s decision to start to step down from Microsoft, the softwaremaker that made him fabulously rich, to work fulltime at the foundation which he runs with his wife, Melinda.