America’s wealthiest have long urged each other to give away more money.
Marie Dageville and her husband Benoit Dageville became billionaires overnight when his data cloud company, Snowflake, went public in September 2020. After that life changing moment, Marie, a former hospice nurse, then set out to learn how to urgently give away that new fortune.
“We need to redistribute what we have that is too much,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press from her home in Silicon Valley.
While many say giving away a lot of money is hard, that is not Dageville’s perspective. Her advice is to just get started.
America's wealthiest people have urged each other to give away more of their money since at least 1889, the year Andrew Carnegie published an essay entitled, “The Gospel of Wealth." He argued that the richest should give away their fortunes within their lifetimes, in part to lessen the sting of growing inequality.
A whole industry of advisers, courses and charitable giving vehicles has grown to help facilitate donations from the wealthy, to some extent prompted by the Giving Pledge, an initiative housed at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2010, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates invited other billionaires to promise to give away half of their fortunes in their lifetimes or in their wills. So far, 244 have signed on.
So, what stands in the way of the wealthiest people giving more and giving faster?
Philanthropy advisers say some answers are structural, like finding the right vehicles and advisers, and some have to do with emotional and psychological factors, like negotiating with family members or wanting to look good in the eyes of their peers.
“It’s like a massive, perfect storm of
Read more on abcnews.go.com