This billionaire is convincing others to abandon Bill Gates's ‘Epstein-adjacent’ The Giving Pledge

The Giving Pledge was launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett.

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is actively persuading ultra-wealthy peers to walk away from Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s philanthropic framework, The Giving Pledge—an effort he says has lost credibility and influence.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Thiel, whose net worth is close to $30 billion, described The Giving Pledge as an “Epstein-adjacent Boomer club,” arguing that its moral authority has eroded and that it no longer resonates with a new generation of tech billionaires. The Pledge, founded in 2010 by Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Buffett, asks the world’s richest individuals to commit to donating at least half of their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.

Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, has never signed the pledge. Instead, he says he has “strongly discouraged” others from joining—and in some cases has “gently encouraged them to unsign,” according to the NYT interview.

“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.”

Drop in signatories, rise in scepticism

The numbers appear to support his argument. After a surge of early enthusiasm, new signatories have declined sharply. Only four billionaires joined the pledge in 2024, compared with 113 families in its first five years, NYT data cited across multiple reports shows. Thiel claims several high-profile donors now privately regret signing, seeing the pledge as socially coercive rather than financially transformative.

His criticism comes at a time when global billionaire wealth has continued to soar—up more than 80 percent since 2020—raising fresh questions about whether voluntary philanthropy can meaningfully address inequality.

Gates factor and ideological split

Thiel has also framed his opposition around Bill Gates’s influence over institutional philanthropy. In earlier remarks reported elsewhere, he warned that pledged wealth could end up funding causes chosen by Gates-aligned foundations, reflecting a broader distrust among some conservative-leaning tech investors of legacy nonprofit structures.

“I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel told the publication. According to Reuters, last year, he recalled calling Elon Musk to retract his pledge, warning the Tesla founder his wealth would go to “left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.”

Thiel added that he’s had conversations with some signatories who have admitted that they were unsure of their commitment. “Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,” he said.