The Most Charitable Billionaires On The Planet

If I asked you what you’d do if you won the lottery, the chances are your answer would start with “Well I’d give some of it to charity, obviously” before launching into your far too detailed plans for a gold-plated-sex-rocket.
Now I’m not calling you a filthy stinking liar, maybe you would actually give some of that money away to charity before spending the rest of the money paying Paul McCartney to sing for you, 24/7, in a window-less, soundproofed room with no doors that you’ve buried 200 feet below the Earth’s crust. But it would be within reason.


What I’m saying is, if it’s a choice between paying for a new children’s hospital, or paying for David Tennant to dress up as the Doctor and go on adventures with you, you’re going to end up sending a really sincere sounding apology postcard to those sick children.

“Fair enough,” you might be saying from the swimming pool of your smallest yacht, which you keep in the swimming pool of your second smallest yacht (and so on). “That’s just human nature.”
Well, if that’s the case you better pay your butler to read this article and then feel bad on your behalf, because these guys have pretty much proved you wrong.

Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet

Warren Buffet usually has a spot within the top two richest people on the planet. Now, personally, if I was that rich I would build a one hundred foot high stature of my own hand, then have an equally large plane made that was the same size and shape, then crash the one into the other to create the most explosive high five in human history, but in some ways Warren Buffet is a better person than I am, and he is yet to resort to such hubris.

No, instead he’s telling the government to tax him more. He’s the rich person equivalent of that kid in class who reminds the teacher they forgot to set homework, and he’s exactly as popular as that kid among his fellow one -percenters.

But then we’re talking about the guy who holds the record for largest single charitable donation ever, £37 billion to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Speaking of which...

Bill & Melinda Gates

Bill & Melinda Gates

Remember the 90s? And how we all used to hate Bill Gates, because Microsoft was evil, while a few more hippyish, edgy folk would loudly support Apple, because they were the plucky underdog?
Times change, is what I’m saying.

Having retired from Microsoft, Bill and his wife Melinda have set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose aims seem too include, well, basically everything. They aim to provide financial services to the poor, help agricultural development, improve education, provide disaster relief.

Maybe we were all a little harsh on Windows Vista after all?
No. You can never be too harsh on Windows Vista.

Chuck Feeney

Chuck Feeney

Of course, when Bill Gates gives away his fortune he holds a press conference and gets Bono to come along. Because that’s why you do it, right? So that everyone knows how awesome you are?

What you absolutely wouldn’t ever get happening would be a billionaire trying to give their fortune away in secret. Would you?
Well, rhetorical question asking person, Chuck Feeney is doing just that. At 81 years old he’s decided that he can’t take it with him, and so is undergoing a top secret mission.

He’s used his money to help the peace efforts in Northern Ireland, help Vietnam’s health care system become more modernised and turn the neglected Roosevelt Island in New York into a technology hub.

And he’s done it all in secret, with charities either having no idea where the huge piles of cash came from, or being sworn to secrecy if they did. He kept his stealth charity jobs up for 15 years. So when will he stop?

J.K. Rowling

J.K. Rowling

The final entrant on this list is truly magical. While others on this list have come to their position through being captains of industry, J.K. became rich by writing stories about a schoolboy wizard, thus becoming the only billionaire on this list your ten year-old will have heard about.

Except she’s not. A billionaire I mean. She’s been giving her money away to good causes so consistently that this month it turned out she’s dropped off the Forbes billionaires list.

Like Buffet she’s been vocal on the moral responsibility the well-off have to pay taxes, saying “I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque.”

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Sam Wright is a freelance writer and philanthropist. Admittedly on a much, much smaller scale.