The world’s stingiest trillionaire

Summary

Podcast Summary: Today, Explained – "The World’s Stingiest Trillionaire" (June 24, 2026)

Overview

In this episode of Today, Explained, hosts Sean Rameswaram and Ariana Espuru are joined by Vox journalist Sarah Hirschender to examine the implications of Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. Using Hirschender’s article "10 Things Elon Musk Can But Probably Won’t Do With $1 Trillion" as a foundation, the episode explores what Musk (or any single person with his resources) could do to alleviate global suffering, and interrogates the culture and effectiveness of billionaire philanthropy. The team also speaks with Bella Devon from the Institute for Policy Studies for a deeper dive into the Giving Pledge and why voluntary billionaire giving often falls short.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Musk’s Unprecedented Wealth (00:01–02:11)

• Introduction of Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire—his wealth comes mainly from stakes in companies like SpaceX after its IPO, rather than liquid cash.
• Sean and Ariana contextualize Musk’s wealth with jaw-dropping statistics:
  • $1.4 trillion net worth (after SpaceX IPO)
  • 13x richer than Bill Gates; 7 million times wealthier than the American middle class
  • “He’s worth more than Switzerland.” — Ariana Espuru (00:38)

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2. 10 World-Changing Things Musk Could Fund (02:33–11:48)

Sarah Hirschender systematically outlines ten transformative ways Musk could use his fortune:

1. End Extreme Poverty Globally (02:35)

• Cost: ~$318 billion/year
• Fund direct cash transfers to pull hundreds of millions out of desperate poverty.
  • “Policy folks have been trying to crunch that number for many years now.” — Sarah Hirschender (02:35)

2. Pay Off All Medical Debt in the US (03:17)

• Cost: ~$220 billion
• 100+ million Americans have crippling medical debt.

3. Universal Preschool in the US (03:41)

• Cost: ~$351 billion
• Would benefit American families and address early education gaps.
  • “He’s got like hundreds of kids himself, so that would, like, personally benefit him.” — Ariana Espuru (04:37)

4. Climate-Proof the World (04:42)

• Cost: $1.2 trillion
• Largest price tag, but could fund climate adaptation infrastructure globally.
  • “He’d be poor. He would not have any money.” — Sarah Hirschender (05:23)

5. End World Hunger (05:21)

• Cost: ~$93 billion/year or $465 billion by 2030
• UN and World Food Programme (WFP) estimate; Musk previously challenged WFP, then ignored their response.
  • “And he basically ghosted.” — Sarah Hirschender (06:13)
  • “He would still have about $500 billion to play around with, do what he wants, continue trying to go to Mars, what have you.” — Sarah Hirschender (06:35)

6. Double US Scientific Research Funding (07:06)

• Cost: Up to $993 billion
• Target intractable diseases like cancer, heart disease, with major scientific investments.

7. Bring Universal Access to Clean Drinking Water (09:03)

• Cost: ~$114 billion/year

8. End Homelessness in the US (09:03)

• Cost: $10–30 billion/year
• To house nearly 770,000 Americans currently without homes.

9. Eradicate Tuberculosis and Malaria (09:03)

• Tuberculosis: $250 billion
• Malaria: $8.5 billion/year
• Diseases with proven solutions but lacking funding.

10. Give Every Person on Earth $146 (11:03)

• Dividing $1.2 trillion by global population would send everyone a small but potentially life-changing sum.
  • “A real embarrassment of riches in terms of ways to just end suffering in this world.” — Ariana Espuru (11:48)

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3. Will Musk Do Any of This? (11:48–14:14)

• Sarah Hirschender’s verdict: “Short answer is probably not.” (12:00)
  • Musk publicly claims he doesn’t believe in money’s future value.
  • “Which sounds insane coming from a trillionaire, but it’s not so rogue…” — Sarah Hirschender (12:19)
• Philanthropy Commentator: “There is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.” (12:37)
• Only a tiny portion (less than 1%) of Musk’s fortune goes to charity annually.
• Musk considers his companies (and projects like Mars colonization) his main contribution to humanity, not philanthropy.
  • “It is very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.” — Philanthropy Commentator (13:30)
• Once slightly more open to philanthropy, Musk now appears disinterested.

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4. The Giving Pledge: Reality vs. Promise (17:54–26:10)

What Is the Giving Pledge? (17:54)

• Billionaires pledge to give away at least half their wealth during their lives or at death.
• Founded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010.

Effectiveness Graded—Bella Devon, Institute for Policy Studies (18:13–23:58)

• Of 32 original billionaire signers still alive and wealthy, only one couple fully kept their pledge.
  • Collective wealth increased 283% (or 166% after inflation) since signing.
  • “So the idea is to get poorer over time, and, meanwhile, almost everyone…has gotten, like, significantly richer.” — Ariana Espuru (20:06)
• Mackenzie Scott, “the most prolific and generous giving pledger,” has given away $26 billion but only reduced her net worth by $6 billion.
• 80% of gifts go into private foundations controlled by donors, not directly to charities.
• Median foundation payout: 9.2%/year, far outpaced by wealth growth.
  • “That money is trickling out back to the public. It’s not keeping pace.” — Bella Devon (22:02)
• The U.S. public subsidizes these donations via tax breaks—even if the money just sits in foundations.

No Game-Changing Results (22:44–24:08)

• No evidence of major social problems solved solely by billionaire philanthropy—diseases and homelessness remain.
• Philanthropy has expanded billionaire influence, but hasn’t offset their accumulating power.

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5. How to Fix It (24:08–26:10)

• Bella Devon advocates for taxing wealth and reforming laws to slow accumulation and require more effective giving.
  • “I think the number one most meaningful intervention is to figure out how to tax wealth…so that people can’t accumulate these fortunes in the first place.” — Bella Devon (24:08)

Cultural Shifts and Empathy in Decline

• Billionaires’ public attitudes toward giving, empathy, and responsibility seem to be deteriorating.
  • “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” — Philanthropy Commentator quoting Musk (25:40)
• Despite policies that Musk has supported leading to devastating consequences for the world’s poor, he remains popular and continues to grow wealthier.
• Regular people are “as generous as they can be,” unlike many in the billionaire class.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “He’s worth more than Switzerland.” — Ariana Espuru (00:38)
• On climate-proofing: “He would be poor. He would not have any money.” — Sarah Hirschender (05:23)
• “If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.” — Elon Musk (quoted by Sarah Hirschender, 06:04)
• “Short answer is probably not…he doesn’t even really believe in money anymore.” — Sarah Hirschender (12:00)
• “There is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.” — Philanthropy Commentator (12:37)
• “It is very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.” — Philanthropy Commentator (13:30)
• “The idea is to get poorer over time, and, meanwhile, almost everyone…has gotten, like, significantly richer.” — Ariana Espuru (20:06)
• “That money is trickling out…It’s not keeping pace.” — Bella Devon (22:02)
• “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” — Philanthropy Commentator quoting Musk (25:40)

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:01 | Musk becomes first trillionaire; contextualizing wealth | | 02:33 | "10 things" Musk could do with $1T (Sarah Hirschender’s list) | | 11:48 | Will Musk do any of this? Why/why not? | | 17:54 | Revisiting The Giving Pledge | | 18:13 | Bella Devon critiques pledge effectiveness | | 22:44 | Results/impacts of billionaire philanthropy? | | 24:08 | What’s needed for real change; policy, taxation | | 25:40 | Musk’s cultural influence, empathy, and the outlook for change |

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Takeaways

• Elon Musk, with his outsized fortune, could feasibly solve or seriously address several global crises—but has shown little inclination to do so.
• The voluntary, low-accountability nature of billionaire philanthropy (e.g., the Giving Pledge) means little wealth actually gets moved to the public or to key problems.
• The system enables wealthy donors to gain image benefits and tax breaks, while society sees negligible progress on the world’s deepest issues.
• Fundamental reform—especially via progressive taxation and more direct accountability—is put forward as the only systemic solution.
• There has been a cultural drift among the ultra-wealthy away from the traditional expectation to use their fortunes for the public good, despite huge need and popular generosity among ordinary people.

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For those who haven’t listened, this episode offers a sharp, evidence-backed, and at times darkly humorous look at how unprecedented private wealth could eliminate global suffering—but likely won’t, unless broader systems change.

Transcript

[Sean Ramesh]

By now, you've surely heard that the second most divisive man on Earth, Elon

[Ariana Espuru]

Musk, recently became the world's first trillionaire. We should note that it's not like he's swimming in a trillion Sacagaweas.

[Sean Ramesh]

The trillion dollars is tied to the

[Ariana Espuru]

worth of his companies and his stock in said companies, which of course fluctuates every day.

[Sean Ramesh]

But the point is that this man

[Ariana Espuru]

has more money than God now.

[Sean Ramesh]

When SpaceX IPO'd, his net worth shot up to $1.4 trillion dollars. That made him about 13 times more wealthy than Bill Gates. If you're middle class, that made him about 7 million times more wealthy than you are.

[Ariana Espuru]

He's worth more than Switzerland.

[Sean Ramesh]

I got some of those fun facts

[Ariana Espuru]

from a vox piece titled 10 Things

[Sean Ramesh]

Elon Musk Can But Probably Won't Do With $1 trillion by our colleague Sarah Hirschender.

[Sarah Hirschender]

I am Sarah Hirschender and I am a fellow for vox's Future Perfect section.

[Ariana Espuru]

And we'll be adapting that piece into audio for you on Today Explained from Vox.

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[Ariana Espuru]

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[Sean Ramesh]

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Okay, what do we have here?

[Sarah Hirschender]

Number one, pull hundreds of millions of People out of extreme poverty. So this is the worst kind of poverty, and it would cost just $318 billion annually. Policy folks have been trying to crunch that number for many years now. And this is from yet a year ago. Some of the policymakers were from the group GiveDirectly, which does do direct cash transfers to people who are living in extreme poverty. And basically it's accounting for all of the money it would take to like, set up a system where you're giving people enough cash and enough food, water, shelter, what have you, so that they're not in that very, very most risky point of poverty.

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[Sarah Hirschender]

Number two, pay off all medical debt in the United States. So that's paying all of the Money that about 1 in 3Americans now have to pay and pass due medical bills.

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More than 100 million Americans are burdened with medical bills they can't pay.

[Bella Devon]

I have about $8,500 in medical debt.

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How much am I being sued for?

[Bella Devon]

$5,443.57 in total.

[Sarah Hirschender]

I have about $20,000 in medical debt from delivering a baby and having him stay in the NICU for four months. Oftentimes really predatory debt that they get into for reasons that are totally outside of their control. And there's about $220 billion of it in the US right now. So even less than it would cost to eliminate the worst forms of poverty. Number three, bankroll universal preschool. So the thing that American parents spend tens of thousands of dollars on each year, there've been a lot of sort of number crunching around how much this would cost lately because there's a lot of sort of political buzz about what it would take to make this a reality. Right now it looks like it would cost about 351 billion doll, which includes, like, constructing new preschools and like hiring teachers and scaling up already existing infrastructure to give every preschooler in the US a free preschool education.

[Ariana Espuru]

And he's got like hundreds of kids himself, so that would, like, personally benefit him.

[Sarah Hirschender]

Yeah. Well, right now, what's funny is some of the only philanthropy that Musk has publicly given or has publicly disclosed giving has been to his own private school network, very close to SpaceX headquarters and in Texas. So there is some precedent here for Musk giving to education. He just needs to give it a little bit more widely. Number four, climate proof the world. So this is really important, and it's a very underfunded issue, and it's a pretty big price tag. This is actually the biggest Price tag on the list, and it would require all of Musk's money, all of it. Climate. I know, $1.2 trillion. Poor guy.

[Sean Ramesh]

He'd be poor. He'd be literally poor after that.

[Sarah Hirschender]

He would be poor. He would not have any money. So that's how big of a deal it is. But he could still put it in a dent without, like, you know, paying off the entire price tag of $1.2 trillion. But that's just like, a way of thinking about, like, this stuff is really important. These are like the cooling systems, the flood protection, the sort of strategies that we need to keep people safe. Number five, end world hunger. And this is one that we've actually heard Musk talk about before. So a few years ago, he said that he would sell off about $6 billion worth of Tesla stock to support the world program. If they could prove that they would use their money in a way that would end the most severe forms of global hunger.

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If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6 billion will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.

[Sarah Hirschender]

And so the World Food Program came back with, like, an actual analysis of what this would look like, like, everything that he asked for. Bullet point. Bullet point of what it would cost to sort of make sure that nobody is dying of starvation around the world or preventable starvation around the world. And he basically ghost. So I don't have huge hopes for this one, but it does have a pretty doable price tag of $93 billion annually, according to the United nations, to end global hunger by 2030. So it cost about $465 billion over that time, which is about half of how much Musk has now. He would still have about $500 billion to play around with, do what he wants, continue trying to go to Mars, what have you. But again, so far, we haven't heard back from Musk on if this is something he'd be.

[Geico Advertiser 2]

Number six.

[Sarah Hirschender]

Research cures for diseases like cancer. And this one's really interesting because the US has been a leading incubator of scientific research and medical research, and that's using about $993 billion in investments from the government, from private industry, and from philanthropy. And so Elon Musk, again, this is another big bet. If he wanted to take all of his money and put it into something valuable, he could literally double the US budget for scientific and medical research, which could make a huge difference for some of these really intractable diseases like cancer, like heart disease. And it would also help to make up for the billions in federal science funding that's been cut under the Trump administration that he could do for. For very little money if he wanted to just sort of close that funding gap.

[Ariana Espuru]

Was he involved in some of those cuts with Doge?

[Sarah Hirschender]

This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw, yeah. He was involved in funding cuts to that. This is a good thing to mention. He was also involved in cuts to funding to fight against the most extreme forms of poverty, which we were talking about earlier, and against global hunger. A lot of, like, sort of where the funding lies now is still under development. But again, his track record is not great on these issues, and research is no exception. Although, again, this is an area where Musk has his own sort of interests of the philanthropy that he's given so far. A lot of it has gone to these sort of scientific breakthrough experiments because it falls in line with his interests. Like he wants the robots. He wants to go to Mars. I don't know how much he cares about medicine, but he has given to scientific breakthroughs before. So this might be a good one for him where he doesn't have to feel like he's, you know, giving too much money for people to eat or, you know, live in a nice house,

[Ariana Espuru]

because who would want to do that?

[Sarah Hirschender]

Who would want that?

[Philanthropy Commentator]

Hmm.

[Geico Advertiser 2]

Let's keep going to number seven, bringing

[Sarah Hirschender]

everyone clean drinking water. And the cost, according to the United nations, of bringing everyone in the world clean drinking water would be about $114 billion per year. So, again, for Musk, this is a kind of modest investment. He could fund this for year after year and presumably, as the years go by, would also get cheaper because you already have some of that water infrastructure in place. Number eight, ending homelessness in America. And now there are a lot of different sort of estimates on how much that would cost, because homelessness is such a complicated issue. But most of the estimates that I've seen put the number at somewhere between 10 billion and $30 billion each year. And that's to house the 770,000Americans that don't have a home at any given time. So, again, this is actually a pretty cheap. He could do this and not even notice the change in his net worth, because, again, a trillion dollars is a thousand billions. This is just 10 to 30 of those billions. Number nine, wipe out tuberculosis and malaria for good. So these are another two diseases that we actually do have a lot of great treatments for and a lot of great preventative measures for. The problem is we don't have the money that we need to make sure that they don't still kill people. And tuberculosis rem, the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It infects about 10 million people every year and it kills about 1.5 million. And estimates for what it would take to eradicate tuberculosis for good is about $250 billion. Not so much for Elon Musk. And if we wanted to tackle on malaria to that, it would cost another $8.5 billion per year. It's still less than maybe a quarter of his net worth right now to eradicate these two really, really, really destructive diseases.

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All right, here we go. Finally, the Last 1. Number 10.

[Sarah Hirschender]

Simply give everyone in the world a check for $146. This is based on a $1.2 trillion net worth. His, his, his actual money has been vacillating a little bit as the IPO takes hold. But if we divided that by the 8.2 billion people on Earth, literally everyone could get a $146 stimulus check. Which means that you can aff annual Netflix subscription if you're living in the US a week or two of groceries. But if you're living in somewhere a low or middle income country, especially a very low income country, that could actually make a really big difference to your life, you might be able to afford a few months worth of food, of clothing, of shelter that you wouldn't be able to otherwise.

[Ariana Espuru]

Wow, Sarah, thank you for that list. A real embarrassment of riches in terms of ways to just end suffering in this world. Do we think Elon Musk will do any of it?

[Sarah Hirschender]

Short answer is probably not. What we've heard from him so far is that he doesn't even really believe in money anymore.

[Philanthropy Commentator]

Money will stop being relevant at some point in the future. Currency becomes irrelevant.

[Sarah Hirschender]

Which sounds insane coming from a trillionaire, but it's not so rogue. From what a lot of these kind of new AI billionaires have been saying over the past few years, which is that the economy is going to be so drastically transformed that money won't be worth what it was anymore.

[Philanthropy Commentator]

But there is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.

[Sarah Hirschender]

And so given that sort of ideology and given his track record of giving, Forbes put it at less than 1% of his fortune to charity each year. It seems unlikely this will happen anytime soon. And also based off of his track record, it seems unlikely that even if the robots are do bring all of this abundant food and water and shelter, that it'll be shared very fairly. But I hope I'm wrong.

[Sean Ramesh]

Has he spoken about it.

[Ariana Espuru]

This guy gives the occasional interview. Has anyone asked him like, hey man, why don't you give more of your money away?

[Sarah Hirschender]

His answer is that most of his contribution to humanity comes from his companies will always come from his companies will probably come from the robots and the sending humans to Mars and the what have you, and not from philanthropy, which he tends to regard with a lot of suspicion.

[Philanthropy Commentator]

It's very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.

[Sarah Hirschender]

Earlier in his career he had a little bit more of, you know, an openness to it. He formed his own foundation. He kind of hung out with Bill Gates and the rest of the like billionaire philanthropist club for a little while. But that's just not sort of the tune he's been taking for the past year, the past few years or so. It's just not something that interests him anymore and he doesn't seem to see value in it.

[Sean Ramesh]

You can read Sarah's list at Vox

[Ariana Espuru]

if our adaptation wasn't enough for you, but when we're back, we're going to talk about the billionaire philanthropist club and

[Sean Ramesh]

how they're not really hacking it either.

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[Sean Ramesh]

Do you remember the Giving Pledge?

[Ariana Espuru]

A bunch of billionaires making big, splashy promises to give away all their money

[Sean Ramesh]

before or when they die.

[Ariana Espuru]

Bella Devon remembers the Giving Pledge. In fact, she and her colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies have been kind of grading its effectiveness.

[Bella Devon]

And Elon Musk signed the Giving Pledge, which was founded by Bill Gates, somebody who's kind of a nemesis of his now. So the Giving Pledge was a voluntary philanthropic commitment founded by Bill Gates, his then wife, Melinda French Gates, and Berkshire Hathaway chair Warren Buffett.

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The idea is that people who are engaged in planning will write a letter talking about what they're doing, and they make a commitment to give the majority of their wealth, either during their life or through their will.

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You can give any time and the idea is to make the commitment to get over the hurdle of saying, don't wait until I think about this later in my life, but think about it now and think about giving.

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And if those little pieces of paper can translate, whether it's into children avoiding diseases, becoming better educated, whether people having a better life in their old age, whatever it may be, that's terrific. And I think a lot of people feel the same way.

[Bella Devon]

They founded this in 2010. Since then, north of 250 people in the world have signed onto this pledge. It's always been in the US around 13 to 14% of domestic billionaires. And it's people with tons of money who feel like signing on to something like this as something that they could do, or at least want to be seen as pledging to do. So the Giving pledge is now 16 years old. My team did a study at 15, you know, old enough for a driver's permit, we were saying. And we feel like there's a significant body of evidence that the pledge is unfulfilled and unfulfillable. So of the of the 32 original signers who are still billionaires, and again, these numbers are from last summer, they had collectively gotten 283% wealthier, or 166%, adjusting for inflation, since they signed onto the pledge, and only one couple in the group group fulfilled their pledge.

[Ariana Espuru]

So the idea is to get poorer over time, and meanwhile, almost everyone, or if not everyone, has gotten, like, significantly richer.

[Bella Devon]

That's exactly right. I think Mackenzie Scott, who is one of the most prolific and generous giving pledgers, she's given away on yield giving's count. That's her charitable entity, $26 billion. I think she's only decreased her wealth by around less than $6 billion since, you know, her separation from Jeff Bezos. So if that's what the most generous philanthropist is struggling to keep up with, you know, everybody else is faring far worse.

[Ariana Espuru]

Is it because they don't genuinely want to give their money away, or is it because they're simply doing so well all the time and getting exponentially richer all the time that it is really hard to do if we want to

[Bella Devon]

give them some credit. Yes, it is mathematically incredibly challenging to give away as much money as their skyrocketing wealth. But I definitely think these billionaires are not stepping up to the plate and giving as much as they should and even as much as they've committed to. Although a great caveat of the Giving Pledge is that you get to fulfill it upon your death in your will, that could look like giving your children control of Your charitable intermediaries. A big part of our study was finding out that 80%, around 4/5 of all the gifts that these pledgers have given go into private foundations, often that they control. So that's what it looks like when you can make a donation that seems like you're parting ways with your wealth and delivering some kind of benefit to the public. But actually, that money doesn't reach public charities or public works or on the ground aid until it leaves the foundation, and there's a significant lag time in there.

[Ariana Espuru]

And what's wrong with all the money going to, like, their foundation that then goes and distributes money to, I don't know, needy children, medical research firms, whatever

[Bella Devon]

it might be, you know, a way station lengthens the journey. Right. We figured out that out of all of the living pledgers who were still billionaires when they signed on, their median foundation payout rate was 9.2% a year. If you're getting so much wealthier and your foundation is only giving away a single digit percentage point of your foundation's wealth every year, and you've gotten a tax incentive and reduction up front for your gift, which the general public is subsidizing up to 73 cents per dollar, that's a very significant investment you're asking the public to shoulder. And that money is trickling out back to the public. It's not keeping pace.

[Ariana Espuru]

Is there any good news here, Bella? Like, have we accomplished anything? Have we eradicated any diseases? Have we cured any diseases? Have we eradicated homelessness in certainly not this country, but another one, I don't know.

[Bella Devon]

It depends who you ask. But I would say no, no good news. I think that, you know, the great indignity of philanthropy and concentrated wealth at this scale is that multiple things can be true at once. It can be true that billionaires overexert their power, that they are able to influence the state of science, innovation, the deliverance of public aid, the shape of housing, and that can make significant inroads and deliver benefits to people. You know, there's no arguing with that. But at the same time, they can be hoarding wealth, not doing enough, sitting, resting on their laurels, you know, banking on this idea that the reputational benefit of signing the pledge is enough, and that those two things can be true at the same time while regular people are struggling to make ends meet, means that the system is in need of a dramatic overhaul. And if the billionaires who promised to give half their money away are doing this poorly at it, that tells us everything that we need to know.

[Ariana Espuru]

Tell us about an overhaul. Like what if you designed the Giving Pledge or a system that's altogether different? What would it look like if it

[Bella Devon]

were up to me? I think the number one most meaningful intervention is to figure out how to tax wealth, figure out how to restructure our economy so that people can't accumulate these fortunes in the first place over which they can exercise such plutocratic control. But knowing that we live in a society that has all these billionaires already has all these foundations with piles of money that haven't been deployed for the public benefit, I think we have to increase transparency so that donors can't use donor advised funds and other popular intermediary and foundations to, you know, conduct dark money giving or play shell games to change the timing of tax benefits so that philanthropists have to make the gift and then see their tax benefit instead of getting it up front without having any obligation to move money.

[Ariana Espuru]

Okay, I'm hearing lots of ideas from you. I'm hearing tax the rich. I'm hearing reform tax code. I'm hearing, you know, change public policy, which noble, but as you admit, you know, less likely to happen. It really sort of just reaffirms why something like the Giving Pledge would have been so attractive in the first place. Because it's big, it's splashy, ethical, moral, humanitarian, generous, all of these things. And I just wonder, have all of those things become less in vogue 15 years down the road? Like Elon Musk talks about empathy as a weakness.

[Philanthropy Commentator]

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

[Ariana Espuru]

As the richest person on earth, he made cuts to U.S. aid programs that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying. And people still love him. And as we saw in recent weeks, like really want to desperately invest in his companies and make him even richer. Do you think we've seen like a cultural shift around giving, around empathy itself?

[Bella Devon]

Yes. In these political conditions, the Giving Pledge is what we're stuck with. We're stuck with waiting for a voluntary effort to reshape society instead of knowing that we'll give, get structural reform that would be guaranteed to deliver it. These are all very concerning trends. And philanthropy in America has always been an expectation of the wealthy people in the country. You know, reaching back to Andrew Carnegie and Rockefeller, that that is what is expected of a rich person in America if our tax code isn't going to adequately regulate them and that that value is no longer closely held at all. You know, regular people are as generous as they can be. We see this in remittances. We see this in small donations to your local food bank, to your religious institution. Everyday people are as generous as they can be and I think that our ultra wealthy people need to take after them more.

[Ariana Espuru]

Bella Devon is the director of the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies.

[Sean Ramesh]

Ariana Espuru is a producer.

[Ariana Espuru]

She made today's show. Jolie Meyers edited, Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore mixed.

[Sean Ramesh]

Gabriel Dunatov donated facts.

[Ariana Espuru]

I'm Sean Ramis firm and it's Giving Today explained.

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