The Anti-Philanthropists: The Billionaires Who Argue Against Giving
The Million Dollar Question: In 2025, Rob and Karen Hale — the Massachusetts telecom billionaires who became known for giving away $1 million a week — donated more than how much, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy?
A) $10.9 million B) $41.9 million C) $110.9 million D) $410.9 millionRead on for the answer.
In September 2026, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said out loud what a lot of very rich people only say privately: that giving your fortune to charity might be the wrong call. The same few weeks, a telecom billionaire nobody has heard of quietly handed over nine figures, a Paychex founder wrote two separate $40 million checks to children’s hospitals inside one day, and the Giving Pledge’s own adult children started telling their parents it’s time to let go of the money. This is the argument happening underneath all of it.
What it is
The “anti-philanthropist” isn’t a miser, and the term is a little unfair — nobody profiled here has actually sworn off giving money away. What distinguishes this group is that they’ve made a public, articulated case for not giving in the conventional, foundation-and-fanfare way, and they’re willing to put their name on that case rather than just quietly under-giving the way most wealthy people always have.
Brian Armstrong, worth close to $10 billion, told Fortune in September 2026 that “a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world, and they get captured.” His objection isn’t that charity is worthless — it’s that charitable institutions drift from their founders’ intent once the founder is gone, and that drift is close to inevitable once an organization outlives the person who funded it. He pointed to the Ford Foundation as his example: an institution he believes would disappoint Henry Ford if he could see what it funds today.
That’s a very old argument wearing new clothes. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie published “The Gospel of Wealth” and declared that “the man who dies rich dies disgraced” — the clearest possible statement that hoarding capital, not failing to give, was the real moral failure. Armstrong’s position inverts it: keeping capital compounding, deploying it into companies and technology rather than into grants, is itself the public good, and handing it to a charitable bureaucracy is where the value actually gets destroyed.
The useful distinction, for a reader trying to sort the sincere argument from the convenient excuse, is between people who are not giving and people who are not giving through an institution they can’t control. Nearly everyone in this piece, on both sides of the argument, falls into the second category or gives directly and visibly. The genuinely silent non-givers — and there are plenty of nine- and ten-figure fortunes that generate no philanthropy news at all, year after year — simply don’t generate a story, which is exactly why they’re not the ones in it.
Who uses it
Armstrong isn’t alone, but he’s unusually willing to say it plainly and attach his name and net worth to the sentence. The wider current runs through what Gil Duran’s book The Nerd Reich and outlets covering it describe as a cohort of tech billionaires who increasingly frame building — companies, infrastructure, AI labs — as the legitimate form of public contribution, with traditional charity recast as something closer to reputational theater or, worse, a tool captured by causes the giver never intended to fund.
Set against that is the Giving Pledge itself — the commitment, started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 with 40 founding members, to give away the majority of a signatory’s fortune. Its own next generation is now the loudest internal critic of how slowly that pledge gets honored. Katherine Lorenz, the 47-year-old leader of the Giving Pledge’s Next Gen group and head of the foundation built from her grandfather George Mitchell’s $3.1 billion sale of his oil and real-estate company, put it bluntly in a Milken Institute report: “You made enough money, mom and dad. It’s time to give it away.” The Giving Pledge has grown from those 40 founding signatories to more than 250 across roughly 30 countries — a scale that makes its own internal debate over pace, not just its existence, a meaningful story in its own right. The report frames roughly $124 trillion in wealth transferring to heirs by 2048 as the real pressure point — a lot of it sitting with people who, per the report, increasingly see themselves as “impact investors” rather than traditional donors, and who are explicitly pushing for spend-down foundations over the perpetual kind Armstrong distrusts for different reasons. The same reporting found nearly a third of adults aged 18 to 29 consider extreme wealth itself morally wrong, against roughly one in ten adults 65 and older — a generational split in attitude toward the fortune itself, not just toward what should happen to it.
That split cuts across both camps at once. It’s part of what makes the Next Gen push and Armstrong’s refusal two sides of the same argument rather than opposites: both are responses, from different directions, to the discomfort of simply holding nine or ten figures and doing nothing publicly notable with the fact.
Why they use it
Two separate motives are doing the work here, and they get flattened together in most coverage. The first is Armstrong’s stated one: control. A living donor can redirect money instantly; a foundation’s board, decades after the founder is gone, cannot be relied on to want what the founder wanted. Keeping capital inside a company you still run, or in a donor-advised fund you still direct check by check, solves that problem by simply never letting go of the decision.
The second motive is closer to political self-defense, and it rarely gets said as plainly as the first. 2026 produced a steady drumbeat of coverage — an ABC Australia interview tied to The Nerd Reich and a Salon piece on data-center backlash “panicking tech oligarchs ahead of midterms” among it — arguing that a cohort of tech wealth is positioning itself as politically besieged. In that climate, “I’m building the next important thing” is a far more defensible public stance than “I quietly wrote a check to a cause,” because the first claims you’re creating value for everyone and the second invites exactly the scrutiny over which causes, and why, that Armstrong says he’s trying to avoid.
How it works
In practice, “refusing to give” rarely means giving nothing. Armstrong keeps a donor-advised fund — a charitable account, typically housed at a sponsoring institution, that lets a donor take the tax deduction up front and then direct individual grants out of it over time, with no legal deadline to actually distribute the money and no public foundation filings exposing the choices. He directs it toward causes he judges to “advance civilization,” on his own schedule, rather than committing to a perpetual institution with its own staff and board.
That detail matters more than it looks. Under federal tax law, a private foundation has to pay out roughly 5% of its assets every year or face an excise tax — a rule written specifically to stop fortunes from sitting inside a charitable shell indefinitely. A donor-advised fund carries no such deadline: once money moves in, the donor gets the deduction immediately, and the actual grants can wait years, or in practice indefinitely, with no public filing that discloses the balance or the pace. Donor-advised funds aren’t new or unique to Armstrong — they’re one of the fastest-growing vehicles in American philanthropy — but his explanation is the clearest public statement yet of why a sophisticated giver might prefer the no-deadline version to the regulated one.
Compare that to the three mechanisms actually moving large money in 2026. Rob and Karen Hale, who made their fortune co-founding Granite Telecommunications, structure most of their gifts as charitable endowments — invested pools that let a small nonprofit draw down roughly 5% a year indefinitely, rather than a one-time grant it has to spend and then go fundraise again. MacKenzie Scott runs the opposite model: large, unrestricted, one-time gifts with no reporting requirements attached, on the theory — in her own words — that “the potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated.” And Greg Carr, the tech entrepreneur who made his fortune co-founding Boston Technology in voicemail systems, runs something closer to an operating philanthropy: a 20-year public-private partnership, extended to 2043, under which he personally funds and co-manages the restoration of Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park rather than writing a check to somebody else’s program.
What it costs
The dollar figures here span three orders of magnitude, and the range itself is the point: there’s no single “amount wealthy people give.” Tom Golisano, the Paychex founder Forbes put at $6.9 billion on its 2025 billionaires list, announced two separate $40 million gifts to children’s hospitals — one in Wesley Chapel, Florida, one in Colorado Springs — on the same day, September 10, 2026, as part of a $225 million round expanding the Golisano Children’s Alliance, a network he started in October 2025 with a $253 million commitment to six hospitals — the same announcement that put his lifetime giving over $1 billion. The Hales’ 2025 total, per the Chronicle of Philanthropy, ran to roughly $110.9 million, on a net worth estimated around $5 billion. MacKenzie Scott, worth an estimated $38.3 billion, has committed $26 billion since 2020, more than $1 billion of it to 24 historically Black colleges and universities alone. Carr has put roughly $100 million of his own money into Gorongosa over roughly two decades. Against all of that, Armstrong’s number is unverifiable by design — a donor-advised fund discloses nothing publicly about size or grants — which is itself the most efficient summary of the refusal position: deliberately opting out of the one thing that makes the other four names comparable at all.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
Saying “I won’t build a foundation” out loud carries a cost most wealthy people avoid by simply staying quiet about how little, or how much, they give. Armstrong’s framing invites the obvious rebuttal — that “net negative” is a strong claim to make about an entire sector while declining to commit to any public, auditable alternative — and he’s absorbed exactly that criticism in the press coverage that followed.
The perpetual-foundation model carries its own cost, which is precisely the one Armstrong and the Giving Pledge’s own Next Gen leaders are converging on from different directions: mission drift. A foundation that outlives its founder by fifty or a hundred years is, almost definitionally, going to be run by people the founder never met, applying judgment the founder never approved. Lorenz’s push for spend-down foundations — distributing the full endowment within a generation rather than in perpetuity — is a direct response to that risk, not a rejection of giving itself.
And the trust-based model Scott uses has its own tradeoff: donors who want to see measurable, attributable impact — a wing named after them, a published outcomes report — generally don’t get that from an unrestricted, no-strings gift. Scott has explicitly built her giving to minimize the control a traditional foundation retains over its grantees, which is also why her model draws both the most praise and the most “can you actually verify any of this worked” skepticism among professional philanthropy watchers.
There’s a final irony worth sitting with: the donor-advised fund Armstrong leans on to avoid “capture” is itself the vehicle most criticized, by philanthropy researchers, for the exact problem he’s complaining about — money parked indefinitely, with no public accounting of whether it ever reaches a working charity at all. A private foundation at least has to disclose its grants every year on a public tax filing and hit that 5% payout floor. A donor-advised fund can report nothing and distribute nothing for years running, entirely legally, which means the sector Armstrong says gets “captured” by drift is, by at least one measure, more transparent than the structure he’s chosen instead.
What people get wrong
The most common mistake is reading “billionaire refuses to start a foundation” as “billionaire gives nothing.” It flattens Armstrong’s actual position, which still routes meaningful money through a donor-advised fund — the structure simply keeps the decisions with him rather than with an institution.
The second mistake is treating the refusal argument as new. It’s Carnegie’s 1889 framing with the conclusion flipped: Carnegie said dying rich was the disgrace; Armstrong and the cohort around him argue that dying having funded a captured institution is the disgrace, and that compounding capital inside a company you still control is the more defensible use of it while you’re alive. Both are moral arguments about the same underlying question — what obligation does a fortune create — dressed in different centuries’ vocabulary.
The third mistake is assuming the wealthy are, in aggregate, pulling back. They aren’t. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s own Philanthropy 50 found America’s top 50 individual donors gave a combined $22.4 billion in 2025 — a record. Michael Bloomberg topped the list at $4.3 billion, Bill Gates gave $3.7 billion, and the late Paul Allen’s estate distributed a $3.1 billion bequest. Armstrong’s position is a genuine, publicized outlier against that backdrop, not evidence of a broader retreat from giving — which is exactly why it generated as much coverage as it did.
The fourth mistake, and the easiest to make reading any single story in isolation, is treating “the wealthy” as one bloc with one opinion on this. A $6.9 billion Paychex founder writing hospital checks, a $38.3 billion philanthropist running one of the least restrictive large-scale giving programs in the country, and a crypto executive keeping his options open inside a donor-advised fund are three different people solving three different problems with the same tool. Nothing about being worth nine or ten figures forces a consistent philosophy about what that money is for.
Bottom line
So: how much did Rob and Karen Hale actually give away in 2025? C) $110.9 million — a nine-figure sum from a couple most people have never heard of, reported the same year a far more famous billionaire was telling Fortune that most charity does more harm than good. The real argument running under this entire cluster of stories isn’t “give” versus “don’t give” — almost nobody in it, including Armstrong, has actually stopped moving money toward causes. It’s about who keeps the authority over that money, for how long, and whether a decision made once, by one person, should bind an institution for a century after they’re gone. Carnegie thought the disgrace was dying with the fortune intact. The newest version of his argument says the disgrace might be handing it to an institution you can no longer control. Both sides are still writing checks. They just disagree about who should be allowed to stop.
Related reading: Philanthropy: Giving, Status, and Influence · The Giving Pledge: Public Promises, Private Delivery · Generational Wealth: How Long Fortunes Actually Last · Reputation: How the Wealthy Manage Image, Exposure, and Scandal · Tech Wealth: How Founders and Investors Live Differently
