they probably won’t, but it’s not scary

We should be skeptical of billionaires who promise to share their wealth

A stern look at the good intentions of the participants in the Giving Pledge was expressed in his column by journalist and head of the inequality program Chuck Collins. He does not believe in the selflessness of the intentions of the donors: “The truth is that such promises can take years, decades or even generations to achieve their non-commercial goals. If they are ever achieved at all.” Joining the Giving Pledge, 230 billionaires from 28 countries have pledged to give away the bulk of their wealth for the good of society. But on the 10th anniversary of the initiative, in 2020, Collins and his colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies found that the “total net worth” of 62 living donors not only hasn’t decreased, it has almost doubled (adjusted for inflation).

Yes, billionaires donate their money, but most often through investing in family or family-friendly funds. And as it turns out, it is the loosely regulated foundations controlled by the philanthropists themselves that dominate philanthropy. “Billionaires can claim huge tax deductions (not to mention rave headlines) for placing funds with these intermediaries. But there is virtually no guarantee that the money will ever go to working charities. Funds are required to pay out only 5% of their assets each year, and most of them pay out little more than that minimum.”

Moreover, ordinary citizens pay for the charity of billionaires. For every dollar a billionaire gives to charity, taxpayers contribute up to 74 cents of lost federal tax revenue as donors claim deductions from their income taxes, property taxes, and capital gains.

Does technology and the silver tsunami mean the end of dynasties in business?

And if you go back to where the digest begins, then University of Michigan professor Jerry Davis published an article a few months earlier confirming the idea that dynasties are not viable in the IT business. He writes that throughout the world almost always the word “business” was synonymous with “family business”. But now you can say goodbye to this rule: “We are at the epicenter of the so-called “silver tsunami” of business transformation. Companies are more likely to end up in the hands of private investors or corporate buyers (or even their own employees) than be passed on to heirs. What’s more, many tech businesses today simply don’t lend themselves to family continuity.”

Among the 10 richest people in the world, most are tech billionaires: Musk, Bezos, Gates. And it’s completely unimaginable that Elon Musk’s grandchildren will ever be in leadership positions at Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter, or that Larry Page and Sergey Brin will oversee Alphabet’s successor in 2060.

Davies believes that IT is not meant to be family dynasties at all, if only because in technology, according to the Techopedia website, “legacy system… refers to legacy computer systems, programming languages, or application software” that are “no longer applicable to current contexts or content.” This is more of a beautiful image than an argument, but in general he is right: tech companies both in spirit and in practice are so different from everything that was before that they change the entire modern business.