Tech-Philanthropists Playing Same Role as the “Robber Barons” of the 19th Century

An HBO series, “The Gilded Age,” personifies the era of the Robber Barons, a period in late-19th century American history that witnessed rapid unregulated industrialization leading to individuals accumulating fortunes. With no income tax and little interference from various levels of government, the robber barons built monopolistic businesses and palatial estates in places like New York City, and Newport, Rhode Island. They had so much money that they needed to find ways to spend it. Some chose philanthropy. Were their motives to donate money to universities, research, create endowments and back causes an expression of their desire to act socially responsible? Or were these acts just good public relations and a means to deflect criticism about how they made their great fortunes?

Some of the names of these robber barons are familiar to this day: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, James J. Hill, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Why? Because their names are prominently featured on the facades of universities, libraries, hospitals, opera houses, symphony halls, and more. They built universities, established foundations, and funded medical and other scientific research. Their accumulated wealth came from their ability to amass power and political influence, dominating industries such as railroads, mining, steel, oil and banking. They bought politicians, exploited labour, and crushed unions and competitors wherever and whenever.

Today, their equivalents are high-technology billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Larry Page, Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Zuckerberg. These people founded or are in charge of companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, valued at more than a trillion U.S. dollars and accounting for 25% of the traded wealth on the S&P500.

The following list doesn’t cover all the above but provides a sample of the current involvement in charitable funding of 21st-century techno-philanthropists.

• Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon by selling books online, has recently stated plans to donate his $120 billion U.S. fortune to charities. One of these is the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund focused on reducing carbon emissions, restoring natural ecosystems and helping climate-vulnerable communities to deal with global warming.
• Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, established the  Brin Wojcicki Foundation to improve elementary and high school education. He has funded research on neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. He co-founded the Burning Man Project, the annual arts and culture festival, and supports organizations that work to combat climate change and promote renewable energy.
• Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft. Little did he know it would launch a digital revolution. Gates is co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which focuses on global health, education, and poverty reduction projects. He is promoting new ways to produce nuclear energy safely and direct air carbon capture.
• Elon Musk has single-handedly changed transportation in the same way Henry Ford did a century ago. He has turned electric cars from being a conversation piece to becoming the transportation standard of the 21st century. His vision is to put a city on Mars making humanity a multi-planet species. He sponsored the $100 million U.S. Carbon XPrize and has made numerous donations to universities to fund medical and scientific research.
• Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder of Meta, formerly Facebook. He along with his wife, Priscilla Chan, have made social and charitable investments that reflect their commitment to improving education, healthcare, and social welfare including The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative focused on personalized learning and affordable access to education, and The Breakthrough Prize Foundation to fund scientists, mathematicians, and others making significant contributions in their fields.

The latest techno-billionaire philanthropist is Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. He is co-founder with his wife Wendy, of Schmidt Sciences. The initial $1 billion U.S. capitalization will begin to help fund breakthrough research into health, including genomics, neuroscience and immunology, into the physical sciences including physics, chemistry and material science, into the environment, on climate change, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture, and into data science and computing, focusing on artificial intelligence, machine learning and the large dataset development tools.

All of these techno-billionaire philanthropists differ from their robber baron antecedents. The world they were born into has attempted to redress the inequalities and lack of social and governmental oversight that allowed their forebearers to accumulate massive fortunes with impunity. Instead, these techno-billionaires demonstrate a strong belief in the transformative power of the technologies they create and are spending billions of dollars from their accumulated wealth to solve the complex problems humanity and the planet face in the 21st century.