That's the message being sent by a series of high-profile Silicon Valley leaders, most recently billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Philanthropy has historically been framed as giving back — after making their fortune from and within society, individuals then return the favor.
Under the new conception of philanthropy, the act of making the fortune itself is the philanthropic act. There's no need to give any money away — feel free to go ahead and drop more than $220 million on Malibu property if you're so inclined. Just by dint of getting rich, your philanthropic work is largely done.
Harvard and Stanford economist Robert Barro sketched the broad outlines of this philosophy in a 2007 WSJ op-ed, focused on Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.
Gates, he wrote, “is kidding himself if he believes that the efforts of the Gates Foundation are likely to provide society anything like the past and future accomplishments of Microsoft.”
Barro's logic was then cited approvingly by The Economist's Matthew Bishop, who went on to convene countless discussions about philanthropy in luxurious splendor on the shores of Lake Como as director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. This vein of thinking is now solidly in the Silicon Valley mainstream.
Google founder Larry Page said in a 2014 interview that the most philanthropic thing he could do with his fortune would be to give it to Elon Musk. As New York magazine's Kevin Roose explained, Page was “saying that companies like SpaceX and Tesla are themselves philanthropic organizations, and that supporting those companies financially is preferable to supporting charitable causes in the traditional way.”
PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel said in 2016 that seeking revenge on Gawker by bankrolling legal cases against the company was “one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was asked in 2018 how he could “do good with” his fortune. His answer was that “the only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel” — something he described as his “most important work.”
OpenAI founder Sam Altman decided this year that his organization's philanthropic mission would be best served by converting it from a nonprofit to a for-profit.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried famously told anyone who would listen that he was making billions of dollars for purely altruistic reasons. (His colleague Nishad Singh, another adherent of effective altruism, gave evidence in court this week about the time he took a $477 million loan from FTX in order to donate the money to charity; he then admitted he never actually got around to doing that.)
Andreessen's techno-optimist manifesto, published this week, generalizes such thinking.
“Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio,” he writes.
Every dollar an innovator like Andreessen makes for himself equates to a $50 philanthropic donation to society at large. Why even bother giving away the dollar, if that's the case.
Andreessen doesn't feel the need to justify his wealth by saying he intends to give his money away, as Bankman-Fried did. Instead, he's redefining the very concept of philanthropy so that the more money he makes, the more philanthropic he is being, even if he gives no money away at all.
Source: https://www.axios.com/2023/10/21/philanthropy-selfish-billionaires