“Chuck Feeney is the opposite of the grotesque consumption and excess that has been coursing through American society for decades, where ostentatious wealth is not something to be ashamed of but flattered. He is what Donald Trump would be if he lived his entire existence backward.”
Reporter Jim Dwyer wrote this in the New York Daily News on January 23rd, 1997, the day Feeney was “outed” as a secret philanthropist who had donated immense sums to universities, hospitals and other good causes, with most recipients not knowing who their beneficiary was.
I recalled his words recently when updating Feeney’s biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t, to include the last decade of his life. It occurred to me they still hold good, even more so. In fact, the contrast between Feeney and Trump could not be more revealing of two polar opposites in today’s world, one of excess, the other of empathy.
In the 1990s, Trump had become a cartoonish symbol of moneyed vulgarity, a media-obsessed real-estate dealer with a reputation for leveraging deals, stiffing small contractors and palling around with Jeffrey Epstein. He was also an exemplar of the hypocrisy that can be found in the world of philanthropy.
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Both Trump and Feeney set up charitable foundations in the 1980s – the Donald J Trump Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies (note no name). Both are now closed, for entirely different reasons. Trump’s foundation was dissolved in 2018, accused of “a pattern of persistent illegal conduct” and misusing foundation money, such as directing $280,000 to settle his business disputes, and $20,000 to purchase a portrait of himself.
Atlantic Philanthropies dissolved itself in 2016, only because it had devoted all of its $8 billion endowment to good causes, in accordance with what Seamus Heaney called, “the great selflessness, the veritable Franciscan renunciation and the Renaissance magnificence” of its founder, Feeney.
Both Trump and Feeney had a passion for buildings. Trump has blazoned his name on multiple towers, hotels and residences, and on the John F Kennedy Center and the US Institute of Peace building in Washington DC, neither of which he supported financially. By contrast, Feeney’s name does not appear on the nearly 1,000 buildings he funded around the world, lasting structures that, in the words of Chris Oechsli, president and chief executive of Atlantic Philanthropies “have served to support higher education, life-saving health research and services, public music and arts, and advocacy for human rights. They continue to enrich the lives of others, beyond Chuck’s life. And none of them has gone bankrupt.”
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All his life, Feeney rejected pleas from university presidents, in particular, to use his name to honour and to highlight association with their benefactor. He wanted no symbols of gratitude. In journeying with him across the world I heard him say many times to others, “It is you we have to thank for doing good with the money”.
In 2020 Dublin City University, which received donations from Feeney totalling €118 million, asked Atlantic Philanthropies for permission to name a campus thoroughfare The Feeney Way. Oechsli persuaded Feeney to agree, as it was a play on words, promoting Feeney’s “way” of doing good in life. “All right,” he said reluctantly, quipping “as long as I won’t be blamed for the litter”.
Other universities rushed to follow suit. There are now Feeney Ways through the campuses of University of Limerick, Cornell University, Cornell Tech New York, the University of California San Francisco and the University of Queensland in Australia.
Unlike his antithesis, Feeney never sat for a portrait. I came across one of him, however, in cardigan and open-neck shirt, done from a photograph by portrait artist Alastair Adams, hanging in the unlikely setting of Rhodes House in Oxford, named after the arch British colonialist Cecil Rhodes.
In 2015 Atlantic Philanthropies entered a $126 million partnership with Rhodes Trust to host seven “Atlantic Fellowship” programmes on five continents. The programmes were conceived by Feeney and Oechsli as a consequential legacy project to build on Atlantic’s global volume of work and continue beyond the end of the foundation’s life, by empowering new generations of leaders, pioneers, researchers, risk takers and trailblazers, to advance fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.
Atlantic Philanthropies ploughed $745 million into the programmes, the biggest-ever single bet by Feeney’s foundation on the future. “It was a big bang, if ever there was one, and a great culminating event,” Atlantic’s last board chairman, Peter Smitham, told me. “Chuck loved it; big bets, big cheques, leadership of fields – all things that we support.”
A constant stream of Atlantic Fellows from around the world now travel regularly to Oxford for collaborative sessions at Rhodes House, refurbished with $46.5 million from Atlantic funds and today a model of equity and diversity. It hosts Rhodes Scholars and other fellowships, including one named after Nelson Mandela. Feeney’s portrait joined those of Mandela and major donors and noted scholars, all commissioned and paid for by Rhodes Trust.
The prototype of the Fellows programmes is the Global Brain Health Institute, an ambitious $178 million project to train 600 global leaders over 15 years from the worlds of science, technology, social services and the arts, to help medical research on the dementia epidemic. It is hosted jointly by professor of psychology Ian Robertson at Trinity College Dublin and behavioural neurologist Bruce Miller at the University of California in San Francisco.
Feeney decided in 2005 he would complete his work by 2016. Giving while living was the right approach, he concluded. It tackled today’s problems today, and besides, “there are no pockets in a shroud”. He met his target on December 5th, 2016, with a final grant of $7 million to Cornell University. This nicely bookended Feeney’s first grant, also $7 million, which he made in 1982 to create a Cornell Tradition programme for students to earn scholarships by combining study and work at the Ivy League university. Feeney sent a message to Atlantic staff afterwards: “Our grants are like sown seeds, which will bear the fruit of good works long after we turn out the lights.”
The lights were turned off for good when the money stream for approved grants was shut off four years later. Feeney signed the papers in a modest San Francisco office on June 14th, 2020, wearing a blue face mask with white dots because of Covid. He and his wife Helga celebrated with cheesecake on paper plates and Spumante in plastic glasses.
Over 30 years Atlantic Philanthropies made 1,616 grants to the island of Ireland totalling $1.93 billion, benefiting mainly universities, health and children’s services, civic and charitable sectors and rights-focused campaigns. Its departure left a void that has been hard to fill.
Once one of the top 25 richest Americans, Feeney retained only $2 million for pension, medical expenses and living purposes, including rent. He faced the question many times: how do his five adult children feel about him giving away all the money? The truth is they admire what their father did. Besides, they were not really disinherited, as Feeney gave a substantial part of his fortune to their mother, Danielle, when they divorced in 1993.
During his last decade Feeney emerged as the moral force of the Giving Pledge, an effort launched in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the rich to commit half of their fortunes to good causes in their lifetime. Gates dramatically pledged in May last year to give away his immense total fortune in 20 years. The Microsoft founder told me in an email a few days later that Feeney made him “think about the merits of spending down a foundation’s assets”. He predicted that the example Feeney set “will have an impact for years to come”.
Feeney’s model of giving everything away in one’s lifetime is still considered an eccentricity in the world of big-money philanthropy. Large foundations typically donate the legal minimum of 5 per cent of net assets to allow the foundation and its usually highly paid staff to keep it going in perpetuity, while paying out a fraction of its value each year.
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His example has, however, infused some billionaires with the giving-while-living notion. Feeney has “inspired a generation of philanthropists, including me,” Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the world’s wealthiest women, told Forbes, adding: “We all follow in his footsteps.” Indian investment banker Amit Chandra said Feeney inspired him and his wife, Archana, to sign all their wealth to a foundation. Mark Benioff, cofounder of Salesforce and owner of Time magazine, credited Feeney with inspiring him “to become the billionaire who wasn’t”.
The war by Trump and his administration against diversity, equity and inclusion has discouraged the type of philanthropy Feeney championed. The threat by Trump to revoke the tax-exempt status of progressive advocacy groups and universities has made mega-rich entrepreneurs, who own businesses empires that might be vulnerable to Trump’s whims, wary of supporting causes anathema to the Maga zealots.
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, who is today worth about $250 billion, withdrew his funding for diversity and equity programmes in California last year, causing dismayed non-profit leaders to cancel plans. Zuckerberg signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 but his percentage giving to date is in low single digits. Elon Musk, worth some $685 billion, also signed the pledge but his charitable giving is estimated at less than 1 per cent each year.
“It comes as little surprise that, at a time when we witness $50 million weddings, multibillion [yes, billion] yachts, and competition to be the first trillionaire among the world’s 3,000 billionaires, we have a US president who plasters the People’s House with gold trinkets to desperately try to prove he matters,” said Oechsli. “Those billionaire yachts: as in Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, they will decay as colossal wrecks, boundless and bare, a crumbling trace of ego and excess. An antidote to this is the story of Chuck Feeney.”
Feeney liked to say, “No good deed goes unpunished”. After a lifetime of good deeds, his final years were punishing. Always a fast walker and talker, he was confined to a wheelchair in his San Francisco apartment following a heart bypass operation in New York in 2013, which also left him with damaged vocal cords and hardly able to speak. In my last telephone call from Dublin, I asked him, “Can you not do anything about that guy Trump?” There was a pause, before he could answer. “I wish I could.”
The world’s most generous philanthropist died on October 9th, 2023. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, two dozen paces from the tomb of Michael Collins. The modest headstone bears the words: “I Had One Idea That Never Changed in My Mind – That You Should Use Your Wealth to Help People.”
An updated version of Chuck Feeney, the Billionaire Who Wasn’t, by Conor O’Clery is published by Hachette. Conor O’Clery is a former Irish Times foreign correspondent
