Larry Ellison, a longtime fixture on lists of the world’s wealthiest, has never been more flush. With a fortune approaching $280 billion by Forbes’ reckoning, the Oracle cofounder now trails only Elon Musk, making Ellison the world’s second-richest man.
The hyper-competitive tech mogul and avid sportsman, now 81, has also been loath to settle down philanthropically, jumping from cause to cause and from one giving vehicle to another over the course of his life. So it’s with some skepticism regarding its longevity that we turn to his latest endeavor, the Oxford, England-based Ellison Institute of Technology. Still, given the magnitude of money involved, it will be a big deal regardless of how long his commitment to it lasts.
In a post on X last month, Ellison provided us with some rare insight into his philanthropic mindset — and, just maybe, his philanthropic endgame.
Writing that he’s “concentrating my resources” on the new institute, Ellison gestured at bold innovations “to solve some of humanity’s most challenging and enduring problems” — new life-saving drugs, new agricultural innovations, and new clean energy technology.
At the same time, he also presented the entire reflection as an “amendment” to his 2010 Giving Pledge, in which he promised to give “at least 95% of my wealth to charitable causes.” As Ellison wrote in his X post, “I believed and continue to believe that practicing philanthropy by giving to nonprofit organizations that pursue public good is important. But there are additional ways that I would like to invest my time and resources in giving back to the world we share.”
The mega-billionaire’s cryptic pronouncement prompted Theodore Schleifer and Nicholas Kulish at the New York Times to dive deeper, and the story they tell about what’s really going on in Ellison world isn’t all that surprising. In a word, Larry Ellison has more faith in for-profit models than the traditional nonprofit sector to solve big problems, and he’s going to use the Ellison Institute of Technology to incubate and grow companies that can do well, even as they do good.
That would be swell if it worked. And to be sure, given the fortune behind it, it would be surprising if the Ellison Institute of Technology didn’t yield something of value. But is yet another shop seeking flashy innovations and entrepreneur-friendly solutions really the right play? In their zeal to pursue groundbreaking solutions to big problems (and profit to boot), billionaires too often lose sight of the fact that persistent support to meet vast, urgent human needs is still the surest way of “giving back to the world we share.” At a time when wealthy nations are pulling back on that vital support, it’s even more crucial for the wealthiest private donors to remember that.
Ellison isn’t alone: billionaire philanthropy loves flashy “for-profit solutions”
Of course, given what we know about the two richest men in the world right now, it’s no great shock that they might feel the greater good of humanity is better served by profit-making enterprises — especially ones they control — than by nonprofits helmed by people they feel lack their hypercapitalist drive for results.
But the philanthropic playbooks of Ellison and Musk aren’t the only places where the lines between altruism and acquisition are blurring as billionaires increasingly dominate the social sector.
As Schleifer and Kulish rightly point out, attitudes among tech’s mega-wealthy are shifting away from the philanthropic model that emerged from America’s Gilded Age and has continued to characterize much of the sector. Instead, as we’ve seen time and again, today’s super-rich take a much looser approach to the business of giving back.
And business it often is. Billionaires’ love of the philanthropic LLC and its capacity to channel profit-oriented investments is by now well documented. Even top exemplars of living donor foundation giving tend now to gravitate toward for-profit approaches and the many grey areas of social entrepreneurship.
Take Bill Gates, who has poured billions into climate-related venture capital investment through Breakthrough Energy, alongside (relatively) smaller tranches of nonprofit giving. And the Gates Foundation itself isn’t averse to paving the way for “for-profit solutions,” as the global development community well knows. One recent stateside example is its collaboration with a bunch of other billionaire outfits — including the Ballmer Group and Charles Koch’s Stand Together — on NextLadder Ventures, a $1 billion bid to “invest in entrepreneurs who are developing personalized solutions that help individuals and families navigate critical moments.” Naturally, there’s an AI partner involved.
And let’s not forget that most celebrated of billionaire philanthropists, MacKenzie Scott, who went big on impact investing last December in what is still her latest reflection on Yield Giving’s site, before going unusually quiet this year. “I’ve asked the investment team helping me manage the assets I’m working to give away to source funds and companies focused on for-profit solutions to these challenges,” Scott wrote.
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One problem philanthropy can solve: making people’s lives better right now
It’s increasingly clear that in our new era of mega-billionaire philanthropy, “for-profit solutions” and a faith in market mechanisms to achieve the greater good won’t just be the purview of corporate bad boys like Ellison and Musk. Pretty much all of the major players are orienting themselves that way, as well as many members of the much-larger cohort of less-well-known super-rich with fortunes “only” in the single-digit billions.
With these fortunes poised to dominate the philanthropy of the future, nonprofits will have to come to terms with the fact that the case for plain old altruism is no longer seen as self-evident.
The hard reality is that to compete for the largesse of people like Larry Ellison — and those who might control their incomprehensible fortunes after they pass — traditional grant seekers will need to effectively counter the idea that the nonprofit sector’s record on “solving the big problems isn’t fantastic.” That, by the way, is how the Ellison Institute’s now-departing president John Bell characterized his patron’s feelings in the New York Times.
One way to do that is to reframe the debate. Yes, nonprofits can and should be more effective, but to hold them to the impossibly high standard of somehow solving the biggest problems is to set them up for failure. In that calculus, they will always lose out in major donors’ minds to for-profit solutions that, if nothing else, can solve the one problem the investor class is naturally attuned to, which is making money.
Effective altruism provides one window into how the debate around philanthropic effectiveness has become unmoored from its roots. It’s true that EA still suffers under its longstanding reputation problem, but I continue to believe EA isn’t going anywhere. One reason for that is something that’s often held against it: its appeal among the tech types that will dominate the sector’s future.
Another is that despite its more fanciful offshoots, the original EA ethos as envisioned by thinkers like Peter Singer isn’t first and foremost about robots and rockets to Mars — it’s about reducing the amount of suffering in the world. In other words, “solving the big problems” in the pursuit of perfection isn’t the goal. Better stewardship of an imperfect planet is.
Even if they haven’t solved the world’s problems in some final, lasting way, nonprofit efforts to make people’s lives measurably better have not been in vain. Poverty, disease, gender inequality and the like still exist, but they are markedly less severe on a global level than they were a generation ago. That, in itself, is a miraculous reality. And while market mechanisms have played a role in that, purely altruistic work is crucial in addressing the most severe harms and the most dire poverty, where there’s often little profit to be had.
The era we’re living through is a reminder that while “progress” is possible and should be pursued, there are likely no permanent solutions to many of society’s problems. The ultra-rich risk making the perfect the enemy of the good if they chase utopia and ignore opportunities to make people’s lives better right now.
