🌅 Today’s stat: 6

SOURCE

Forbes

WHAT TO KNOW

• George Soros leads the way in giving as a percent of wealth, having donated 76% of his net worth over his lifetime, followed by MacKenzie Scott (36%), and Edythe Broad (33%). Warren Buffet (30%), Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin (28%), and Bill and Melinda Gates (26%), round out the group of six.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Tech leaders Jeff Bezos (1.6%), Mark Zuckerberg (2.1%), and Sergey Brin (2.5%) have given away the smallest percentages of their net worths, while Elon Musk has given away so little of his wealth that he doesn’t even qualify for the list. Musk has given away $620 million in his lifetime, amounting to just 0.26% of his $240 billion net worth and less than a third of the $1.9 billion minimum to be included in the list.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Today’s so-called “tech tyrants” are a far cry from our earlier robber barons, like Andrew Carnegie, who, in his 1889 essay The Gospel of Wealth, argued that massive wealth accumulation comes with important moral obligations and responsibilities to the public good. Carnegie, who built more than 2,500 public libraries around the world, along with various educational and healthcare institutions, parks, and public spaces, also argued for an aggressive inheritance tax to clawback money from wealthy Americans who don’t give back during their lifetimes: “By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.” In Carnegie’s judgment, “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”