Opinion: It’s hard to applaud billionaires – but these few deserve recognition

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on Twitter. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

In a vastly unequal world, it can feel a little rich to cheer on billionaires — even those who use their tremendous resources to help others rather than to buy another Gulfstream.

There is something irrefutably broken about a global system in which a small number of people are able to amass staggering amounts of wealth, a huge number struggle to simply survive (and many don’t) and then we applaud those among the uber-wealthy who bestow some of their largess on the suffering masses.

But this is the global system we do have and, within it, some billionaires are behaving much more generously and ethically than others. And their work should stand in contrast to those who simply accrue more toys or watch their net worth go infinitely up.

Melinda French Gates is one of the good ones. This week, as she explained why she resigned from the Gates Foundation, which she co-founded two decades ago, she said she’ll be focusing the next stage of her philanthropy on women’s and girls’ rights, including in the United States.

French Gates has long been an advocate for family planning and women’s rights abroad, and now she’s dedicating $1 billion through 2026 to those issues. Only a tiny proportion of US charitable giving goes to groups working on the rights of women and girls — according to an op-ed by French Gates in The New York Times, it’s just 2% — and she wants to be part of correcting that. She’s also using some innovative strategies, both funding existing organizations with track records of great work and giving 12 remarkable people (the former prime minister of New Zealand, an Afghan girls’ education activist and others) a $20 million grant budget each so they can fund the organizations they’ve seen do great work.

And in the US, French Gates’ funding will target reproductive rights at a moment in which American women have seen our right to abortion rolled back half a century. Whether French Gates will actually do the urgent and crucial work of funding abortion remains to be seen — her commitments are more vaguely about family planning and reproductive rights. But she is at least committing to funding groups that work to secure and report on these rights at a crucial time.

Another billionaire woman using her resources for good is MacKenzie Scott. As her ex-husband Jeff Bezos blasts himself into space and gallivants with his new girlfriend, Scott has pledged to donate the entirety of her fortune to charity; earlier this year she announced $640 million in giving to 361 small organizations.

Most billionaires do not behave this way. According to Forbes, two-thirds of the billionaires on its 2023 top 400 list gave less than 5% of their wealth to charity. And out of those same 400, just 11 gave more than 20% away. French Gates and Scott are two of them, and they are joined by two other women, meaning that more than a third of the country’s most generous billionaires are female. This is wildly disproportionate to the actual number of uber-wealthy women: Just 60 women make Forbes’ top 400 list, or just 15%. Female billionaires, in other words, are far more likely than male ones to give away substantial portions of their wealth.

America’s richest men have a dismal track record of giving. The top five on the Forbes 2023 list are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett and Larry Page. Musk, Ellison and Page have given away less than 1% of their wealth, and Bezos less than 5%; Buffett, to his credit, has given away 20% or more, and is a well-known funder of vital causes, including global women’s and human rights. But some, including Musk and Bezos, have spent heavily on various vanity projects — Musk infamously on purchasing Twitter (now rebranded X) for $44 billion; Bezos on a rocket ship to space that cost him some $5.5 billion.

And some billionaires are using their largess for what many would argue is bad. A number of ultra-wealthy people are donating to former President Donald Trump’s campaign, for instance.

To be sure, others have made promises to do good with their wealth. Sam Altman of the controversial OpenAI has recently signed onto the Giving Pledge, a commitment for the super-rich to give away at least half of their wealth, started by Warren Buffett, French Gates and her ex-husband Bill Gates. There’s no enforcement mechanism and no real contract, just a moral commitment. But the Giving Pledge is at least one tool to encourage the wealthy to give at least as much as they get.

Altman’s decision to sign it now does seem a bit cynical, especially as artificial intelligence has been getting much critical press, and as OpenAI in particular has been under scrutiny after the actress Scarlett Johansson accused them of using her voice after she refused their requests to do so. He needs a public relations win, and maybe he is hoping that philanthropy will help to rehabilitate his tarnished image.

That seems unlikely. But if he follows through with the pledge — and if he gives the money to organizations that are meeting crucial needs — that’s a win. And it’s part of what the Giving Pledge seems structured to do: push the rich to give not just out of the good of their own hearts, but for the public recognition when they do (and the side-eye when they don’t).

It’s laudable that women like French Gates and Scott, and men like George Soros, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are giving away so much of their money. Philanthropy doesn’t come close to solving the problems that create a demand for philanthropy in the first place, and in a more just universe, so much of the world’s wealth would not be in the hands of so few. But as long as it is, we should look kindlier on those who give it away than those who hoard it for themselves.

And we should look more unkindly on those who hoard it. It is deeply selfish, greedy and frankly antisocial to accrue so much more than what any person possibly needs when there are so many who need so much more than they have. Many people who are far from billionaires give away what are for them significant sums to try to close these gaps: to make sure that pregnant women can get prenatal care, that young children get basic vaccinations, that the rights of minorities are defended, that roofs are over heads, that food is in hungry bellies, that preventable diseases are prevented and deadly ones treated or cured.

That people who have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime don’t do the same is morally reprehensible. So yes, we can applaud the good billionaires who give their wealth away, even if we think that they are representative of a bigger inequality problem. But we should also cast a sharp eye on the wealthy who choose to turn their backs on their fellow humans, and simply sit on their piles and piles of cash.