Today's tech titans aren't robber barons. They're worse.

They're a confederacy of cheapskates — and some are trying to subvert the act of giving

Elon Musk and what matters most to him. (Photo by Press Connect)

A century and a half past the dawn of the first Gilded Age, we live with the legacy the robber barons left us. The Rockefeller Foundation still “promotes the well-being of humanity throughout the world,” the National Gallery of Art still showcases Andrew Mellon’s collection of works by Europe’s Old Masters, and you can still visit hundreds of the libraries that Andrew Carnegie created.

It all happened because the original robber barons — reviled in their time for flaunting their wealth and abusing labor — were, in the end, generous. In fact, they pretty much created modern philanthropy. Several seemed to subscribe to Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” which maintained that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

Fast forward to our second Gilded Age, though, and you won’t find any tech titans giving to charity the way Carnegie did. Instead, the likes of Elon Musk, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos subscribe not to the Gospel of Wealth, but rather to the Gospel of Self.

For proof, note the following, published here on Substack in February by Aziz Sunderji, a former director of research at Barclays Investment Bank:

So there you have it. Whereas the big three Gilded Age robber barons all gave away at least 20% of their wealth, Bezos gave away about 2%, and Musk and Ellison gave away even less. Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, Sergey Brin and Steve Ballmer gave away slightly more. Scattered amid this confederacy of cheapskates are various Kochs (of campaign finance infamy) and Waltons (the Walmart Waltons, not John-Boy and his kin).

To be fair, some modern billionaires – MacKenzie Scott (Bezos’ ex), Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg – have given away a significant share of their wealth. But Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk are far richer than any of them, and they’ve donated a comparative pittance.

There’s anecdotal proof, too, that today’s tech billionaires would rather spend on themselves rather than on the common good:

• Musk, whose latest pay package approaches $1 trillion, has not just one private jet, but a fleet of them.

• Ellison, who appears to be oblivious to the optics of owning a private island, has owned 98% of the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi since 2012.

• Bezos, who soiled his obituary by gutting the Washington Post staff when he could have spun the legendary newspaper off as a nonprofit, sails the Mediterranean in a $500 million superyacht.

What’s more, some of today’s tech billionaires are in the business of dissing the very act of giving. Topping that list is Peter Thiel, the profoundly selfish libertarian founder of Palantir.

A decade and a half after Buffett, Gates and Melinda French Gates established “the Giving Pledge” to encourage the wealthy to donate most of their wealth to charity, Thiel is busy subverting the pledge.

“I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel proudly told The New York Times earlier this year. Thiel now dismisses the pledge as an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”

It’s unclear whether Thiel had anything to do with the fact that Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong withdrew support for the pledge in 2024, or that Ellison amended his pledge to devote more of his money to for-profit ventures.

But the Giving Pledge has clearly lost its momentum. The Times reported that the number of new pledges dropped from an average of 22.6 annually over its first five years to only four in 2024, although the number bounced back to 14 last year.

And the progressive Institute for Policy Studies reported last year that only two of the original signatories – financier John Arnold and his wife, Laura – actually fulfilled their pledge. According to that report, if the rest of the billionaires who signed the pledge actually kept their promise, America’s charities would have an additional $367 billion to spend.

How much money is that, really? Well, it’s nine times more than the U.S. government spent in foreign aid annually through the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Of course, with Musk saying at the time that USAID was “beyond repair,” his “Department of Government Efficiency” gutted the agency last year. The Center for Global Development estimates the resulting cutoff of U.S. aid meant that upwards of a million lives were lost in 2025.

But don’t you think that the guy who founded Tesla and SpaceX might be smart to have found a way to “repair” USAID?

Probably, but it turns out that Musk just doesn’t believe in giving money away.

“If you care about the reality of doing good and not the perception of doing good, then it is very hard to give away money effectively,” he said in 2022. “I care about reality. Perception be damned.”

OK, then, here’s a dose of reality, perception be damned. Forbes magazine estimates Musk’s net worth at $839 billion. Calculating in a potential inflation rate of 3% a year and figuring USAID’s baseline budget would resume at its recent baseline of $40 billion annually, Musk could afford to personally fund the agency for 17 years or so.

But of course, we know why that’s never going to happen.

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