Bill Gates and the 10 other tech titans with the power to shape how the US fights the coronavirus
The billionaires’ response has been called “lackluster.” Here’s who can change that.
What Silicon Valley billionaires decide to do with their money and power from now on in the Covid-19 crisis matters. It could affect the amount of suffering the US experiences in a recession and the amount of time before things return to normal. It might even have an impact on the number of people who will die from the coronavirus.
So this moment is a test for the nation’s billionaires, who tend to point to their philanthropy as a riposte against calls for higher taxes. If ever there were a moment for the nation’s wealthiest to part with considerable amounts of their net worth to solve a social problem, it is now.
But despite the frequency of the word “million” in press releases, observers say some of the public commitments to charity so far have been relatively small. For instance, two heavily tech-backed philanthropies, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Tipping Point, have both unveiled $30 million fundraising goals for Covid-19-related giving, amounts that have struck outsiders as surprisingly modest.
David Callahan, a prominent journalist on the subject, deemed the billionaire class’s total giving to be “lackluster.”
“If anyone can afford to give more in response to the pandemic, it’s the richest of the rich, with far greater assets than private foundations,” Callahan wrote in his newsletter Inside Philanthropy over the weekend. “In recent years, though, giving by billionaire donors has amounted to only a tiny sliver of their wealth and many billionaires barely give at all. There are no signs yet that this crisis will change that.”
Though billionaires’ foundations and donor-advised funds face calls to drastically increase or accelerate giving at this moment, philanthropy veterans say it can take time — CONTINUE READIING: Bill Gates and the 10 other tech titans with the power to shape how the US fights the coronavirus - Vox