History of Competitive Philanthropy From Carnegie to Mackenzie Bezos, Bill Gates, & Warren Buffett – TownandCountrymag.com

On July 20, not long after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos returned to earth after an 11-minute space flight aboard one of the rockets his Blue Origin space exploration company had manufactured, he faced the cameras, still wearing his blue spacesuit but now sporting a cowboy hat, to make a surprise announcement. He was inaugurating a Courage and Civility awardWe need unifiers and not vilifiers, he saidand the first winners were celebrity chef Jos Andrs and TV news analyst Van Jones, each of whom would get $100 million.

Andrs and Jones were understandably ecstatic, but among philanthropy analysts, the gifts reception was mixed. Sure, $200 million is a lot of money (though perhaps not to a centi-billionaire), but some commentators (myself included) noted that the post-flight charity announcement had a slapdash quality to it. It appeared to be a hastily contrived PR move to address the grumbling that the worlds richest man wasnt focusing his philanthropic attention on problems confronting the planet he currently inhabits. Still others interpreted Bezoss celebration of civility as pushback against mounting critiques of Amazons corporate practices.

General Photographic Agency

Then there was the unconditional nature of the donations. No bureaucracy. No committees. They just do what they want, Bezos said. On the one hand, this no-strings-attached approach to large scale giving is now widely applauded by nonprofit advocates. Yet its most prominent recent champion has been MacKenzie Scott, Bezoss ex-wife, who has given away some $8.6 billion over the last year, to widespread acclaim. Much of the coverage of Scotts torrent of giving has hinted that it compares favorably with her ex-husbands. MacKenzie Scotts generosity puts to shame Jeff Bezoss billions, the New York Daily News trumpeted last December. So Bezoss own no-strings gifts raised the question: Was this the sincerest form of flattery, or flex to an ex-turned-philanthropic rival?

In a sense, the same tangle of competitive impulses and high-minded ideals characterized the billionaire space race more broadly, which pitted Bezos against Virgin Atlantics Richard Branson and SpaceXs Elon Musk. Bezos, Branson, and Musk often described in grand, stratospheric terms what was ultimately an effort to catalyze the high-end space tourism business. Talking to reporters after he had become the first of the three billionaires to take a space trip himself, Branson celebrated Virgin Galactic as an instrument of egalitarianism. Imagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds, from anywhere, of any gender, of any ethnicity have equal access to space. And they will, in turn, I think, inspire us back here on Earth. Back in February, Musk had announced that his Inspiration4, which launched in September, would carry with it a humanitarian message of possibility.

Bettmann

Yet all this high rhetoric was drawn back down to earth by the unmistakable sense that the three moguls were driven as much by the compulsion to go first and farthest as by any humanitarian ideal. Competitive machismo can be powerful rocket fuel. Branson had moved up the launch of his SpaceShipTwo by several months, seemingly to beat Bezoss planned departure. And the run-up to the launch of Bransons ship brought with it a kind of aeronautical trash-talking on social media, with Blue Origin mocking Bransons airplane-size windows via Twitter and pointing out that, unlike Bezoss craft, Bransons would not actually fly to outer space, per one conventional marker. None of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name, the company sniffed.

So it turns out you can ask questions about the motives that drove Bezos into space similar to the ones you could ask about what fueled his philanthropy once he returned: How important is competition as a goad to good acts? And how should the fact that a philanthropic mission or gesture might have been spurred by competition with a rival shape our assessment of the deed itself?

"How important is competition as a goad to good acts?"

The history of large scale philanthropy provides some answers. Its full of selfless givers and donors who disdained attention and cared little for the recognition their gifts received. But that history is also marked by the spirit of competition, by donors whose need for distinction and honor fueled their generosity. Indeed, for millennia, elites have turned to philanthropy as a means of securing and affirming social status and distinguishing themselves from their peers. In ancient Greece that competition led to the funding of lavish public banquets, grand civic works, and spectacular gladiatorial contests. During the Middle Ages it led to the construction of cathedrals and religious houses.

In the United States, the Gilded Age was the first major high-water mark of philanthropic competition. This was the case for two interrelated reasons. First, those decades saw the creation of gigantic industrial and financial fortunes, which generated a wave of philanthropy that established or endowed a bumper crop of colleges, universities, museums, and hospitals.

Second, the public began to pay attention to these giftstracking them, scrutinizing them, praising them, and sometimes criticizing them. Some of the most notable philanthropists, such as Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller, sought to resist this philanthropic publicity, preferring that his giving be conducted in a realm of privacy and discretion. But the publics demand for information about the nations leading benefactors was too powerful, and even Rockefeller ultimately succumbed, releasing data on his giving to inquiring reporters.

The major philanthropic rivalry of the first Gilded Age was between Rockefeller and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The two were polar opposites in temperament and mien: Rockefeller tall, angular, and taciturn; Carnegie, short, cherubic, and garrulous. Plus, they didnt like each other much; in private Carnegie referred to Rockefeller as Wreckafellow, while Rockefeller considered Carnegie a publicity-mad blowhard, so their competition carried an extra edge. As the two emerged as the wealthiest individuals of the age, and as the leading philanthropists, newspapers began to offer running tallies of their gifts, like the baseball box scores featured in local papers, noting who had given more. Cartoonists depicted the two industrialists as racers in a millionaire marathon, with coins spilling from their pocketsand with a crowd presumably watching.

"And how should competition shape our assessment of the deed itself?"

The implication of such depictions was clear: Philanthropy had become a spectator sport. And this highlighted an important dimension of philanthropic competition. Yes, giving provided a way for the wealthy to burnish their egos and boost their status. But it also provided some framework for public accountability.

This has certainly been the case at the turn of the 21st century, during which our Second Gilded Age has generated its own colossal private fortunes and its own surge of large scale philanthropy. Even more than in the last century, megagiving is now a spectator sport, conducted before a scrutinizing public. And so the field is once again set for philanthropic competition.

Two developments have made the terrain especially fertile. The first is the more sophisticated means of tracking, analyzing, and ranking philanthropic gifts that journalists who focus on philanthropy have adopted. One of these is giving lists, those annual tallies of the largest donations and the most generous benefactors. A small handful of such lists appeared during the first Gilded Age, but they were rudimentary and irregularly tabulated. Giving lists became a fixture of the analytic landscape only in the past few decades. Their rise can be traced to an interview New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd conducted with CNN co-founder Ted Turner in August 1996. The media mogul admitted that when he had recently made several $100 million donations, what worried him most was not that the money would be spent ineffectively but that the gifts would take such a chunk out of his total net worth that he would plummet down the Forbes 400 roster of the nations wealthiest men and women. Extrapolating from his own experience, Turner suggested that similar concerns among the nations billionaires might be preventing them from giving big.

His remedy wasnt to repudiate status consciousness but to channel it in a more constructive direction by calling for the creation of an alternative ranking system, one that would spotlight the biggest givers. This list would harness the self-regard and competitive nature of the wealthy in service to the greater good. Turner even suggested that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, at the time the two richest men in the U.S., had let him know that if there were a list of who did the giving rather than the having, they might be inclined to give more.

Bobby Bank

Soon after the publication of the interview, Fortune took up Turners call and released what it declared the most rigorous and comprehensive philanthropy list yet created, ranking the top 25 gift-givers of 1996. Over the next several years, other publications developed giving lists of their own. The top donors often cooperate only grudgingly with the researchers who compile these lists, but many of them are deeply invested in their positions in the rankings. At the very least, these lists help legitimize and draw attention to philanthropic competition.

The second development encouraging philanthropic competition has been the spread of peer pressure to promote large scale giving among high-net-worth individuals. The most famous example of this is the Giving Pledge, the campaign begun in 2010, led by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, to convince the worlds billionaires to give at least half their wealth to charity. (As of the beginning of 2021, the pledge has 216 signatories from 27 countries.) One of the most significant elements of the pledge is its evangelical aspect: Signatories are asked to make a public statement of their reasons for signing, and this is meant to encourage their wealthy peers to join them. As at least one of the signers acknowledged in his pledge letter, by fostering this sort of public spectacle, the pledge also sets the stage for competition. Directing the same competitive instincts that these driven people employed to achieve the pinnacle of financial and social success, noted real estate tycoon Sylvan Adams, the Giving Pledge is encouraging us to outdo one another in giving our wealth away. Brilliant!!!

Adam Berry

Of course, very few donors would ever publicly acknowledge the extent to which they are driven by the spirit of competition. But sometimes they cant help themselves. In a recently published book on Facebooks battle for domination, for instance, the authors include a telling scene in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg complains to his advisers that the philanthropy he established with his wife Priscilla Chan, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and to which he pledged 99 percent of his Facebook wealth, hasnt received enough positive attention. Why dont people think of me the same way as Bill Gates? he huffs to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks COO.

The outburst wasnt one of Zuckerbergs finest moments, but when it comes to assessing his giving, should it matter? Should the public care whether a donor is driven by a desire for social status and recognition, alongside whatever purer humanitarian motives are compelling him or her?

The competitive philanthropic drive can certainly lead to showy, meretricious donations. But the history of philanthropy demonstrates that it can lead to worthy ones, as well. That history is a good reminder that the philanthropic endeavors of the rich and powerful has long been a tangle of the highest elements of human nature and the meanest, the principled and the petty, the stuff of the heavens and of more earthy materials.

This story appears in the November 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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History of Competitive Philanthropy From Carnegie to Mackenzie Bezos, Bill Gates, & Warren Buffett - TownandCountrymag.com