Up until his passing in 2020, Gates’ father, who had the same opinion, served as co-chair of the Gates Foundation.
Longtime friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, who has already given tens of billions of dollars to organizations and charged his children with distributing 99 percent of his remaining money.
After his death, also had an impact on Gates’ views on philanthropy. Gates remarked that Buffett “remains the ultimate model of generosity.” “I was first introduced to the concept of giving everything away by him.”
In 2010, Gates and his now-ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, co-founded the Giving Pledge alongside Buffett.
More than 240 billionaires have since signed it, promising to donate the majority of their wealth during their lifetimes.
Gates also mentioned the impact of Andrew Carnegie, a steel magnate from the Gilded Age whose 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth” is regarded as a paradigm for contemporary philanthropy, in his post.
Gates claimed that when he read that essay decades ago, the words “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced” really stood out to him.
