I re-posted a meme to Facebook the other day which suggested that billionaires are “hoarders”, likening them to a “human dragon sleeping on their piles of rubies and gold”. Someone popped up to dispute this characterization, making the following assertions:

  1. “Billionaires are quite philanthropic. Sure, this is a general statement, but check it out.”
  2. “The reason billionaires are billionaires is that, generally, they work extraordinarily hard to invest their capital using wisdom while calculating risks.”

Now, there were other assertions and comments, but these two were enough to not pass my smell test. My immediate inclination was that (a) most billionaires aren’t particularly charitable, and (b) most of them have gotten that rich by running exploitive companies - either exploiting natural resources or human beings, or both.

Rather than just go with the smell test, though, I decided to do a first-level investigation and summarize what I found. To do this, I took the Top 10 off the current Forbes 400 list. These guys (and they’re all guys) are all household names, each worth $60B or more. (Yes, that’s billion with a B.) To put $60B in context, if you got $80,000 per day, every day, since Jesus was born, neglecting any inflation or earnings on that money, you would just have gotten to $60B this year. That’s a staggering amount of money.

For each one of these guys I am summarizing their current net worth, reported charitable giving, and how they made their fortune. Spoiler alert: it’s not a pretty picture. Let’s go.

#1: Elon Musk

2022 net worth: $167.6B

Charitable giving: in 2022 he donated $160M, the most ever! Fortune also reports he gave $5.7B to a foundation, but it’s under his control and hasn’t actually been disbursed anywhere yet. That $160M is less than 0.01% of his net worth. Even the $5.7B is only 3% of his net worth… seems unimpressive.

How he made his money: mostly from Tesla. How much his own work and skills contributed to the company’s growth is up for debate, but Tesla and Musk have been sued for running a toxic, discriminatory, abusive workplace on multiple occasions.

#2: Jeff Bezos

2022 net worth: $120B

Bezos has in theory pledged to give his money away, but reports say it’s unclear whether he is actually doing that. The biggest documented donation I saw reported was $100M to Dolly Parton’s foundation. Which, to be fair, is a noble cause, but $100M is only 0.08% of Bezos’ net worth.

How he made his money: Amazon, of course. You don’t have to search far to find multitudes of reports of Amazon’s abusive practices to their employees. Maybe not such a good guy, either.

#3: Bill Gates

2022 net worth: $106B

Credit where credit is due: Gates has already given more than $50B of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, and that Foundation is doing significant work around the world in important causes. Bravo, sir.

How he made his money: Microsoft. As in, he wrote the original MS-DOS, and just managed to hit the wave of computers in an unprecedented and unrepeatable way.

#4: Larry Ellison

2022 net worth: $101B

Ellison reportedly is struggling to figure out how to give his money away. So far his reported donations are all in the $100 - $200M range (0.1% - 0.2% of his net worth). (He apparently found it easier to spend $300M to buy an entire Hawaiian island.)

How he made his money: Oracle databases. And then a lot of big finance and investing.

#5: Warren Buffett

2022 net worth: $97B

Here’s the other bright light on this list. Lifetime Buffett has given away almost $50B, largely to the Gates Foundation. However, his wealth is growing “faster than he can give it away”.

How he made his money: investments. If there’s one guy on this list who meets the “a lot of hard work and wise investing” criteria that my interlocutor set out, Buffett is probably that guy.

#6: Larry Page

2022 net worth: $93B

It is reported that he has funded his foundation to $6B, but most of it is in donor-advised funds for later donation, and while the tax breaks have kicked in now, the money hasn’t actually gone to any good use yet. That same article is touting donations to actual charities in the $100k (yes, that’s a K) range, which is, oh, 0.0001% of his net worth. Color me unimpressed.

How did he make his money: he co-founded a little company called Google. So some of that I’m willing to attribute to just hitting the right tech at the right time, similar to Gates and Ellison. But Google’s money-making methods continue to get nastier every time you look - the incessant ads, the deep user tracking, the toxic YouTube algorithms that are happy to feed you fascist content if it’s what keeps you watching… not particularly honorable.

#7: Sergey Brin

2022 net worth: $89B

Brin has given maybe $1B over the past 10 years to his own foundation (which is beneficial for tax purposes), and of that billion, the biggest chunk, almost $200M has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. A noble cause, yes… but only donating 1% of his net worth over the past 10 years? Peanuts.

How he made his money: He’s the other half of Google. (See #6.)

#8: Steve Ballmer

Net worth: $83B

Ballmer’s foundation breathlessly announced a $217M donation in 2022, which is to say they are going to offer grants on the topic of climate change. That appears to be the biggest chunk Steve has donated anywhere. That’s 0.25% of his net worth, which I guess is a little more than Sergey Brin gave to the Fox Foundation, but still… it ain’t much.

How he made his money: Ballmer was in early following Bill Gates into Microsoft. If only he were so quick to follow in Gates’ footsteps when it comes to giving his money away.

#9: Michael Bloomberg

2022 net worth: $78B

Bloomberg also deserves some credit here. He has donated as much as $14.4 B lifetime (18% of his current net worth) to his personal foundation, and that foundation has actually dispersed significant funds, including $1.7B in 2022. He has also given nearly $3B in donations to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

How he made his money: he started in investing, and then jumped on the integration of computers and investing in the early 1980s. He branched out into other areas of financial market reporting, but then has also taken detours into politics, serving as the mayor of New York City from 2002 - 2013.

#10: Jim Walton

2022 net worth: $58B

In 2019 Walton made his first significant donation to charity - $1.2B to (naturally) the Walton Family Foundation. That Foundation has done some good stuff in Arkansas, so credit where credit is due there. But $1.2B on a net worth of $58B is still only 2% as a donation, which feels paltry.

How he made his money: he inherited it. (As did his siblings, who are #12 and #15 on the Forbes 400 list.) And how does Walmart continue to turn profits? Well, among other things, by mistreating their employees. Wages below the poverty level. Poor working conditions. Unlawful termination. Union busting. Maybe $1B for art and education in Arkansas can assuage your conscience? Jim can only hope so.

Let’s sum up

So, the Top 10. “Quite philanthropic”. “Work very hard” and made admirable business decisions. Really?

“Quite philanthropic” - I think we can safely put that label on Gates, Buffett, and Bloomberg. Many of the others have made pledges that their money will be given away before or at their death, but that isn’t doing anybody any good now. So, 3 out of 10. Not great, Bob!

“Work very hard and made wise business decisions” - I mean, at some level if you want to lionize people playing the capitalism game to come out ahead, by definition these guys have all done that. But if you want to put some sort of moral filter on it, asking whether their gains are well-gotten or not, I think we could safely chalk up Musk, Bezos, Page, Brin, and Walton in the exploitive category. I can’t say I’m very impressed with Ballmer, either, but Microsoft isn’t ugly and predatory in quite the same way that Walmart, Amazon, and Google are.

You do you, Facebook friend, but to my eyes, it’s not a stretch to see these guys as dragons sleeping on piles of gold and gems while 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty.

A little more back-of-the-envelope math

Just for fun, let’s imagine the top income tax bracket from the 1950s (by all accounts, a wonderful time that a lot of people want to go back to) was in place for these guys. That bracket was 91%. And let’s just do the math on their current net worth. All up the wealth of the Top 10 here and it comes out to $994B. Take that times 91% and you come up with $904.5B which would be in the US Treasury. Now, we can quibble about how wisely the US Government spends its money… that’s for another time. But the US budget deficit last year was $1.4T. So, a tax on just the top 10 wealthiest men in the country would take care of more than two-thirds of the deficit. Yes, that’s just for one year. Adjustments still need to be made. But the wealth of these privileged few, even in the scope of the national economy, is, to quote a famous cartoon moose, “antihistamine money”: not to be sneezed at.