16 ms·

Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

119 points by muon 16y ago

c1sc0 16y ago
Now that is a worthy goal to set for a budding entrepreneur: becoming a future philanthropist.
- nhebb 16y ago
  That was Andrew Carnegie's goal. Way before becoming rich he had a goal to give away mass sums of money. He wrote about his philanthropic philosophy in The Gospel of Wealth, summarized here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Erm... Did Carnegie state his goal was to give away money before he acquired massive amounts of it or was it after being labeled a robber-baron? It's easy to say that being a nice guy was your goal all along after you get caught. Not that Paul Allen is not a nice guy. There seems to be no evidence on the contrary.
    - hnal943 16y ago
      after you get caught Caught doing what? Being successful?
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        Being "successful" also means, at least for me, having a clear conscience. I don't want to do business with people who will do whatever it takes to make a profit. Life is not a zero-sum game. Even if it were, there are limits to what a gentleman should and shouldn't do and Carnegie did a lot of the latter in his pre-philanthropist life.
    - byrneseyeview 16y ago
      Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 200X as much. He wrote himself a memorandum, in which he totaled up his net worth and income, and decided it was enough. Apparently it wasn't, but that's a couple thousand libraries, organs, etc. that he otherwise wouldn't have purchased. Oddly enough, Warren Buffett wrote something similar at about the same age, when he also semi-retired. Like Carnegie, he went back to work, multiplied his fortune a few more times, and had a lot more to give away at the end.
      - rbanffy 16y ago
        I agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us. Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?
        colinplamondon 16y ago
        How did he ruin people? His company was incredibly progressive for its time.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        Ruthless competition, mostly. The example that illustrates his character is not related to this kind of behaviour, but to how he treated his workforce. The Homestead strike was caused by a broken promise to tie salaries to profits which, made in a downturn, reduced payments. When profits returned, he broke the promise, refused to keep salaries tied to profits, locked out the union workers who protested and used violence to end them. In the end, he hired immigrant workers in place of the previous employees, working for less in harsher conditions. Not exactly role model. http://bit.ly/8XRSwN http://bit.ly/8XRSwN This quote is, IIRC (lost track of the book and had to resort to Google) from Theodore Roosevelt.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Chuck Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies are well worth studying in this regard - they basically apply the same standards and practices to giving money away as Feeney did to making the money in the first place: http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/atlantic-report/giving-while-living http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/atlantic-repo... Feeney is the guy who came up with the idea of duty-free stores at airports. By the time anyone noticed he was a multi-billionaire, he had already set up his foundation and put almost his entire fortune into it.
earle 16y ago
An amazing gift from an amazing individual and one of the original hackers.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Indeed. He was the best of the early Microsoft.
kylelibra 16y ago
"The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him." -Voltaire
- hugh3 16y ago
  Apparently he's unmarried and has no children, so there's not really many good options for his estate apart from charity. I suppose he could disperse it among nieces and nephews, or build himself a pyramid for a tomb, but charity seems like the obvious route.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    No, I say build the pyramid!
  - zandorg 16y ago
    I vote for the moonbase.
- tednaleid 16y ago
  Sure, but PA has also done quite a bit of philanthropy during his lifetime too and has also done some cool things in the sciences (SpaceShipOne, Brain Atlas, etc). What you're implying isn't charitable :).
- qq66 16y ago
  Who does it belong to?
pavs 16y ago
Which is better? Just giving away money or targeted investment on critical research/development and social needs to inflict a lasting change (without taking any profit)? Would you drop few billion dollars on Africa or would you make investments to create long-term industry that will give people jobs and help them help themselves? I think what Paul/Gates/Buffet and others are doing is great, but I think we have to start looking at ways to make maximum impact instead of feel-good philanthropy to non-profit organization. IMO ofcourse.
- chime 16y ago
  Calling the Gates Foundation some feel-good philanthropy is doing a disservice to everyone who has contributed towards global health and development: > Our work in infectious diseases focuses on developing ways to fight and prevent enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases. > http://www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health/Pages/overview.aspx http://www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health/Pages/overview....
- hnal943 16y ago
  Did you read the article? Allen is not planning to "drop a few billion dollars on Africa." He's making specific charitable investments, just like you suggest.
- josefresco 16y ago
  The efforts by these tech and finance giants are definitely not "feel-good philanthropy". That's prob the most insulting thing I've heard said about their work considering that it's one of the largest philanthropic undertakings ... ever.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  In order to do what you are suggesting, infrastructure and education needs to exist. You aren't going to worry about working on your cool start-up if you need to cart clean water 2 miles on your shoulders every day and your kids are sick with malaria.
known 16y ago
To escape from death tax? http://to./4jj5 http://to./4jj5
Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
Man, he may even give away enough that he's no longer one of the 250 richest people on the planet. Don't get me wrong, it's a great gesture but let's put it in perspective. He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. In terms of disposable income and day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000.
- mistermann 16y ago
  > probably less significant Significance depends on point of view. There are at least 3 points of view here: the donor, the recipient, and the outside observer. I think the recipients in this case might have a decidedly different opinion on the relative merit between donations measured in tens of thousands and those measured in millions. For many it can literally be the difference between life and death. So, it may "hurt" more for you to give $10,000, but the absolute good that can be accomplished with hundreds millions is far more important, imho.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. It will make a difference in lives of millions of others - absolute good is better than relative good. > ... day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000. It's much better for the world for billions to go into productive endeavors than $10,000. You shouldn't award extra points for suffering. In fact, I award extra points for a person being able to do massive good without hurting themselves.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    I'm not talking about suffering, I'm talking about not even slightly restraining the most astronomical privilege. The man is worth $13bn. He could give away 99% of his wealth and still live out his days in a level of luxury which will never be experienced by 99% of Western world's population, let alone the world's.
yumraj 16y ago
Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
- gscott 16y ago
  Giving money away seems to be a full time job, so Jobs he is still working at Apple and doesn't have time yet. Woz, he cashed in a lot of his stock when it was $24 a share (much of it to give away). I am not sure how much he has left but I don't believe he truly has enough to just give any more away.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- burriko 16y ago
  Woz is fairly well known as a philanthropist, and has been since the early 80s. I'd guess that he just hasn't drawn the same level of press attention that the Microsoft billionaires have. I'm also quite sure that he has nowhere near as much cash as them, despite how well Apple are doing now, they've had much harder times than MS. I've no idea about Jobs though. His personal life has always been very secretive, and I would imagine any involvement with charity would be just as secretive.
  - sadapsi 16y ago
    You are plainly biased in favor of Apple inc! MS sold an O.S. while Apple tried to sell the whole bundle. Whatever B.S. reasons you have for user x, I can tell you that people can live with a 1 bsod per day if they are getting the machine at nearly half the price. Apple tried to become vertical monopoly, and made only enemies in the process.It is repeating same mistakes in mobile space as well. Jobs actions arent exactly better than Bill Gates, and as far as Woz is concerned he is a pariah and steve jobs doesnt gives a shit about him
- andreyf 16y ago
Ardit20 16y ago
Why was he able to make billions anyway? That money would have been spent better on charging less for his products than giving it to charity where much will probably be lost in immense bureaucracy.
- c1sc0 16y ago
  Could you define a level of bureaucracy that would be acceptable to you? 10%? 20%? 30%? While many charities are woefully inefficient, so are many businesses. And charities don't live in some kind of vacuum: inefficient charities fail just like inefficient businesses.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Its the greater point which you have missed. He is not being some great guy, he is not being awesome, in this drunken state I am free to say that which I wanted to all along, he is a thief pure and simple, it is not HE giving away money, HE is not being ethical, some kind of god we should all adore for being so nice to us paroles. He stole this money. He charged much more for his products than he clearly, plainly knew he should have. He is not some guy who might have guessed how much he should charge, thus through trial and error trying to find out. He knew full well that he was making obscene amounts of money because he was charging highly for his products. So my point was not about charities. They are a matter for a different discussion. My point was, why on earth was he able to make BILLIONS, you know an amount that millions of us together need to work our Ass off to gain in perhaps our life time. Its legitimised theft and nothing else.
    - mrtron 16y ago
      I wouldn't advise arguing against capitalism while drunk. What does the amount they charged for their product have to do with anything? Pricing is influenced by the market - the market was willing to pay what they were being charged. I don't know that pure capitalism is the ideal system (being Canadian I rely on public services like health care) but it is very difficult to claim he is a thief. They were wildly successful because they added a lot of value to the market.
parallax7d 16y ago
This is a good step, but the state should also be taxing them at close to 90% as well. That way all the other billionaires who don't care about philanthropy are forced to contribute back into the system that allowed them to gain the wealth in the first place.
- mrtron 16y ago
  I don't know why this is being voted down - it is a valid point of view and historically significant! There are pros and cons to different tax models. A lot of US history has contained very high tax rates for the highly wealthy. This was the first google result (I don't want to promote that org) http://s3.moveon.org/images/tax_rate-chart.gif http://s3.moveon.org/images/tax_rate-chart.gif
- ArturSoler 16y ago
  That would make everyone poorer in the long term.
protomyth 16y ago
He earned it so he can spend it anyway he wants, but it would probably help a lot more people if he used the money to become an angel investor in a lot of small businesses that would employ a lot of people. Funding startups in bio and space that would advance the technology, but probably wouldn't get funding from other sources.
- devinj 16y ago
  No, he probably wouldn't. Look, I understand that this site has a lot of startups, but don't let the echo chamber go to your head. Funding startups is expensive-- we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum, I expect, for a startup that most likely will fail. That same hundreds of thousands of dollars can save the lives of thousands of people that are starving to death or dying of disease.
  - protomyth 16y ago
    True, but a billion does a lot of startups and research money leads to treatments. Also, doing a small business equivalent to the charity that pays single bill for a person (since many people are one bill away from broke) would help amazingly well. Buying a expensive coffee machine for the local family bakery, or paying a months rent for the some other local business might put them on solid ground and allow them to hire people. I just think someone with his business talent could really build neighborhoods better than most generic charities. Once again, it is his money and how he chooses to spend it is his business and is amazingly generous.
jacquesm 16y ago
Is there a list of achievements of the foundation ?

119 points by muon 16y ago

c1sc0 16y ago

Now that is a worthy goal to set for a budding entrepreneur: becoming a future philanthropist.

nhebb 16y ago
That was Andrew Carnegie's goal. Way before becoming rich he had a goal to give away mass sums of money. He wrote about his philanthropic philosophy in The Gospel of Wealth, summarized here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1889carnegie.html
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Erm... Did Carnegie state his goal was to give away money before he acquired massive amounts of it or was it after being labeled a robber-baron? It's easy to say that being a nice guy was your goal all along after you get caught. Not that Paul Allen is not a nice guy. There seems to be no evidence on the contrary.
  - hnal943 16y ago
    after you get caught Caught doing what? Being successful?
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Being "successful" also means, at least for me, having a clear conscience. I don't want to do business with people who will do whatever it takes to make a profit. Life is not a zero-sum game. Even if it were, there are limits to what a gentleman should and shouldn't do and Carnegie did a lot of the latter in his pre-philanthropist life.
  - byrneseyeview 16y ago
    Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 200X as much. He wrote himself a memorandum, in which he totaled up his net worth and income, and decided it was enough. Apparently it wasn't, but that's a couple thousand libraries, organs, etc. that he otherwise wouldn't have purchased. Oddly enough, Warren Buffett wrote something similar at about the same age, when he also semi-retired. Like Carnegie, he went back to work, multiplied his fortune a few more times, and had a lot more to give away at the end.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      I agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us. Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?
      - colinplamondon 16y ago
        How did he ruin people? His company was incredibly progressive for its time.
        rbanffy 16y ago
        Ruthless competition, mostly. The example that illustrates his character is not related to this kind of behaviour, but to how he treated his workforce. The Homestead strike was caused by a broken promise to tie salaries to profits which, made in a downturn, reduced payments. When profits returned, he broke the promise, refused to keep salaries tied to profits, locked out the union workers who protested and used violence to end them. In the end, he hired immigrant workers in place of the previous employees, working for less in harsher conditions. Not exactly role model. http://bit.ly/8XRSwN http://bit.ly/8XRSwN This quote is, IIRC (lost track of the book and had to resort to Google) from Theodore Roosevelt.
anigbrowl 16y ago
Chuck Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies are well worth studying in this regard - they basically apply the same standards and practices to giving money away as Feeney did to making the money in the first place: http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/atlantic-report/giving-while-living http://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/learning/atlantic-repo... Feeney is the guy who came up with the idea of duty-free stores at airports. By the time anyone noticed he was a multi-billionaire, he had already set up his foundation and put almost his entire fortune into it.

earle 16y ago

An amazing gift from an amazing individual and one of the original hackers.

rbanffy 16y ago
Indeed. He was the best of the early Microsoft.

kylelibra 16y ago

"The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him." -Voltaire

hugh3 16y ago
Apparently he's unmarried and has no children, so there's not really many good options for his estate apart from charity. I suppose he could disperse it among nieces and nephews, or build himself a pyramid for a tomb, but charity seems like the obvious route.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  No, I say build the pyramid!
- zandorg 16y ago
  I vote for the moonbase.
tednaleid 16y ago
Sure, but PA has also done quite a bit of philanthropy during his lifetime too and has also done some cool things in the sciences (SpaceShipOne, Brain Atlas, etc). What you're implying isn't charitable :).
qq66 16y ago
Who does it belong to?

pavs 16y ago

Which is better? Just giving away money or targeted investment on critical research/development and social needs to inflict a lasting change (without taking any profit)? Would you drop few billion dollars on Africa or would you make investments to create long-term industry that will give people jobs and help them help themselves? I think what Paul/Gates/Buffet and others are doing is great, but I think we have to start looking at ways to make maximum impact instead of feel-good philanthropy to non-profit organization. IMO ofcourse.

chime 16y ago
Calling the Gates Foundation some feel-good philanthropy is doing a disservice to everyone who has contributed towards global health and development: > Our work in infectious diseases focuses on developing ways to fight and prevent enteric and diarrheal diseases, HIV/AIDS, malaria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and neglected and other infectious diseases. > http://www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health/Pages/overview.aspx http://www.gatesfoundation.org/global-health/Pages/overview....
hnal943 16y ago
Did you read the article? Allen is not planning to "drop a few billion dollars on Africa." He's making specific charitable investments, just like you suggest.
josefresco 16y ago
The efforts by these tech and finance giants are definitely not "feel-good philanthropy". That's prob the most insulting thing I've heard said about their work considering that it's one of the largest philanthropic undertakings ... ever.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
In order to do what you are suggesting, infrastructure and education needs to exist. You aren't going to worry about working on your cool start-up if you need to cart clean water 2 miles on your shoulders every day and your kids are sick with malaria.

known 16y ago

To escape from death tax? http://to./4jj5 http://to./4jj5

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago

Man, he may even give away enough that he's no longer one of the 250 richest people on the planet. Don't get me wrong, it's a great gesture but let's put it in perspective. He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. In terms of disposable income and day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000.

mistermann 16y ago
> probably less significant Significance depends on point of view. There are at least 3 points of view here: the donor, the recipient, and the outside observer. I think the recipients in this case might have a decidedly different opinion on the relative merit between donations measured in tens of thousands and those measured in millions. For many it can literally be the difference between life and death. So, it may "hurt" more for you to give $10,000, but the absolute good that can be accomplished with hundreds millions is far more important, imho.
lionhearted 16y ago
> He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. It will make a difference in lives of millions of others - absolute good is better than relative good. > ... day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000. It's much better for the world for billions to go into productive endeavors than $10,000. You shouldn't award extra points for suffering. In fact, I award extra points for a person being able to do massive good without hurting themselves.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  I'm not talking about suffering, I'm talking about not even slightly restraining the most astronomical privilege. The man is worth $13bn. He could give away 99% of his wealth and still live out his days in a level of luxury which will never be experienced by 99% of Western world's population, let alone the world's.

yumraj 16y ago

Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

gscott 16y ago
Giving money away seems to be a full time job, so Jobs he is still working at Apple and doesn't have time yet. Woz, he cashed in a lot of his stock when it was $24 a share (much of it to give away). I am not sure how much he has left but I don't believe he truly has enough to just give any more away.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
burriko 16y ago
Woz is fairly well known as a philanthropist, and has been since the early 80s. I'd guess that he just hasn't drawn the same level of press attention that the Microsoft billionaires have. I'm also quite sure that he has nowhere near as much cash as them, despite how well Apple are doing now, they've had much harder times than MS. I've no idea about Jobs though. His personal life has always been very secretive, and I would imagine any involvement with charity would be just as secretive.
- sadapsi 16y ago
  You are plainly biased in favor of Apple inc! MS sold an O.S. while Apple tried to sell the whole bundle. Whatever B.S. reasons you have for user x, I can tell you that people can live with a 1 bsod per day if they are getting the machine at nearly half the price. Apple tried to become vertical monopoly, and made only enemies in the process.It is repeating same mistakes in mobile space as well. Jobs actions arent exactly better than Bill Gates, and as far as Woz is concerned he is a pariah and steve jobs doesnt gives a shit about him
andreyf 16y ago

Ardit20 16y ago

Why was he able to make billions anyway? That money would have been spent better on charging less for his products than giving it to charity where much will probably be lost in immense bureaucracy.

c1sc0 16y ago
Could you define a level of bureaucracy that would be acceptable to you? 10%? 20%? 30%? While many charities are woefully inefficient, so are many businesses. And charities don't live in some kind of vacuum: inefficient charities fail just like inefficient businesses.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Its the greater point which you have missed. He is not being some great guy, he is not being awesome, in this drunken state I am free to say that which I wanted to all along, he is a thief pure and simple, it is not HE giving away money, HE is not being ethical, some kind of god we should all adore for being so nice to us paroles. He stole this money. He charged much more for his products than he clearly, plainly knew he should have. He is not some guy who might have guessed how much he should charge, thus through trial and error trying to find out. He knew full well that he was making obscene amounts of money because he was charging highly for his products. So my point was not about charities. They are a matter for a different discussion. My point was, why on earth was he able to make BILLIONS, you know an amount that millions of us together need to work our Ass off to gain in perhaps our life time. Its legitimised theft and nothing else.
  - mrtron 16y ago
    I wouldn't advise arguing against capitalism while drunk. What does the amount they charged for their product have to do with anything? Pricing is influenced by the market - the market was willing to pay what they were being charged. I don't know that pure capitalism is the ideal system (being Canadian I rely on public services like health care) but it is very difficult to claim he is a thief. They were wildly successful because they added a lot of value to the market.

parallax7d 16y ago

This is a good step, but the state should also be taxing them at close to 90% as well. That way all the other billionaires who don't care about philanthropy are forced to contribute back into the system that allowed them to gain the wealth in the first place.

mrtron 16y ago
I don't know why this is being voted down - it is a valid point of view and historically significant! There are pros and cons to different tax models. A lot of US history has contained very high tax rates for the highly wealthy. This was the first google result (I don't want to promote that org) http://s3.moveon.org/images/tax_rate-chart.gif http://s3.moveon.org/images/tax_rate-chart.gif
ArturSoler 16y ago
That would make everyone poorer in the long term.

protomyth 16y ago

He earned it so he can spend it anyway he wants, but it would probably help a lot more people if he used the money to become an angel investor in a lot of small businesses that would employ a lot of people. Funding startups in bio and space that would advance the technology, but probably wouldn't get funding from other sources.

devinj 16y ago
No, he probably wouldn't. Look, I understand that this site has a lot of startups, but don't let the echo chamber go to your head. Funding startups is expensive-- we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars minimum, I expect, for a startup that most likely will fail. That same hundreds of thousands of dollars can save the lives of thousands of people that are starving to death or dying of disease.
- protomyth 16y ago
  True, but a billion does a lot of startups and research money leads to treatments. Also, doing a small business equivalent to the charity that pays single bill for a person (since many people are one bill away from broke) would help amazingly well. Buying a expensive coffee machine for the local family bakery, or paying a months rent for the some other local business might put them on solid ground and allow them to hire people. I just think someone with his business talent could really build neighborhoods better than most generic charities. Once again, it is his money and how he chooses to spend it is his business and is amazingly generous.

jacquesm 16y ago

Is there a list of achievements of the foundation ?