The Giving Pledge

He made his fortune in the fitness industry, and he said to me, he said, you know what? Everything changed the year I started giving back.

I love The Giving Pledge, where a lot of the financial titans on the planet have vowed to give away their entire fortunes before they die.

One of my favorite books is The Billionaire Who Wasn't.

It's the story of the gentleman who came up with the idea of duty-free shops.

Every year, for example, Buffett holds a luncheon auction where wealthy individuals and business leaders pay millions just to meet and dine with Buffett himself, with all proceeds going to charity.

But his most notable philanthropic gesture is easily the Giving Pledge.

In 2006, after the passing of his first wife and not understanding why a single man should have the amount of wealth that he had accumulated, Buffett promised to give away 99% of his assets, which today stands at an estimated $75.5 billion, with funds going primarily to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity with a number of different focuses.

After becoming the wealthiest man in the world, Buffett gave it all away.

So he used to preach that a lot.

And for personally, I like that value for myself that if I don't take their giving pledge, I have no right to preaching.

If I don't know how to sacrifice pieces of my lifetime, the choices that I make, then it is not like I don't have a right to ask for others to give, especially when it hurts what they will do otherwise with that money.

I love it.

Why don't we have a Giving Day? So he started celebrating what was called the Joy of Giving Week, which then later changed its name to Daan Utsa, which basically translates the same thing in Hindi.

So Winkert started promoting that for a long period of time.

And as Giving Pledge scaled, he thought that these billionaires are taking Giving Pledges, but we have seen normal people give a lot more anyway.

So how do we also spotlight a normal person's giving? They may not have a billion to give away, but we already know they give larger.

He is a founder of Highbridge Capital and also launched the Robin Hood Foundation and the Dubin Breast Cancer Center at Mount Sinai after Eva's own experience with breast cancer.

They have also signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge to give away a portion of their wealth in their lifetime, which is estimated by Forbes to be around $2 billion.

So I guess you and Bill Gates have another thing in common, huh? Not just giving away money, but also being involved with a sick pedophile after he was convicted of being a sick pedophile.

What an exclusive club you elites reside in, huh? Who would want to be involved with you people? The table needs to be flipped upside down and the game pieces need to be scattered because these people truly believe they're going to get away with all of this.

For Rubenstein, history is not a hobby, it's a guide to power, humility, and how quickly luck can change everything.

He's also committed to giving away most of his money through the Giving Pledge.

That decision was relatively easy.

We joined the Giving Pledge.

And we knew something about it, obviously, before we did it.

And one of the things the Giving Pledge asks its members to do is to pledge to give at least half of their net worth, to give away half of it before their death or upon their death.

And that wasn't hard for us to do.

We were already doing it.

What are you doing?

Well, I was an original signer of the Giving Pledge.

I got very lucky.

I grew up in Baltimore, and my parents were not high school graduates, and so I, you know, I had a modest background growing up.