The Giving Pledge
charitable campaign for rich people to donate at least 50% of their wealth
The Giving Pledge is a charitable campaign, founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, to encourage wealthy people to contribute a majority (i.e. more than 50%) of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of October 2025, the pledge has more than 250 signatories from 30 countries. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, at a total of US$600 billion.
The campaign is intended to establish a social norm of charitable giving by the wealthy. In its early years, it was highly successful at attracting signatories, whereas the rate of new signatories has declined in recent years.
By 2026, Buffett's relationship with Bill Gates, who was acknowledged to have at one point had ties to Jeffrey Epstein, had become severely strained, with Buffett also severing his decades long partnership with the Gates Foundation.
Description
The organization's stated goal is to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give at least half of their net worth to philanthropy, either during their lifetime or upon their death. The pledge is a public gesture of an intention to give, not a legal contract. On the Giving Pledge's website, each individual or couple writes a letter explaining why they chose to give.
“The Giving Pledge” enters the record as charitable campaign for rich people to donate at least 50% of their wealth. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Giving, Pledge and charitable can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“The Giving Pledge” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Giving, Pledge and charitable provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q203807. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2026.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “The Giving Pledge”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow The Giving Pledge primary sources, The Giving Pledge archive and Giving research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
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This entry incorporates text from “The Giving Pledge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.