Peter Thiel Is Actively Convincing Billionaires to Abandon The Giving Pledge — and It’s Working
17th March 2026
Fortune, a Voice of the Crust.
Peter Thiel isn’t just skeptical of The Giving Pledge—he’s been actively working to dismantle it from within, telling signatories to walk away from their commitments and calling the organization an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.”
Silly, of course, but effective with the portion of the population that has Epstein! on the brain, which has (as you might expect) a significant overlap with the portion of the population who has hatred for rich people on the brain—using the latter term loosely, of course.
In an interview with The New York Times, Thiel claimed The Giving Pledge, or the philanthropic campaign to get the world’s wealthiest to commit to giving away 50% or more of their wealth, has fallen out of style. “They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” he said. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”
They plucked all of the low-hanging fruit (rich people who are also Democrats).
The U.S. wealth divide has progressed to new extremes, with the top 10% of households holding more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to Federal Reserve data. The majority of the country’s wealth remains in the hands of older generations. And the wealth accumulation has hollowed out the middle class over the last few decades.
Welcome to the Narrative, in which Fortune is a willing accessory. What has ‘hollowed out the middle class’ is taxes and government regulations that make housing unaffordable and one-income traditional families impossible.
Philanthropy has long acted as a de facto realization of trickle-down economic theory.
Welcome to the Narrative. ‘Trickle-down economic theory’ is a myth pushed by people who hate wealth accumulation and can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that wealth accumulation is necessary for investment and jobs and progress. Philanthropy is merely the expression of the common human impulse to help other people, which The Usual Suspects think ought to be the job of the government (under their political control, naturally) rather than something done by people who might not have the right Woke views.
A shift away from that philanthropic framework—and one of the most organized efforts in modern history to transfer wealth out of the pockets of the country’s richest—could signal that the money spigot is tightening.
Not all wealthy people are stupid enough to be progressives.