Musk, the world's richest individual, has pledged US$6 billion to help stop world hunger - if certain conditions are met. The Tesla CEO hit a record net worth of $315 billion on November 1. That net worth has ballooned by more than $140 billion this year. Some detail:
After adding tens of billions to his net worth on Monday, November 1, Elon Musk has become the first person with more than $300 billion to his name. Musk’s fortune settled at $306.4 billion on Tuesday afternoon, Forbes estimates, after crossing the previously untouched $300 billion threshold on Monday as Tesla’s stock continued its tear.
Bezos, with an estimated net worth of $192.9 billion, is the second-richest person in the world. He was the first person to break the $200 million net worth barrier, making close to $80 billion in the Covid-19 storm from March to December last year:
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has pledged $2 billion in funding to help restore nature and transform food systems.The funding, which will come from the Bezos Earth Fund, is part of his commitment to spend $10 billion on fighting climate change this decade. (Source)
Andrew Carnegie, like all the others on our list, the possessor of great talent, sold his steel company, Carnegie Steel, to J.P. Morgan for $480 million in 1901. According to the Carnegie Corporation, Carnegie's personal peak wealth was about $380 million, or around $309 billion by today's standard.
In his final years, Carnegie's net worth was US$475 million (as then), but by the time of his death in 1919 he had donated most to charities and other philanthropic endeavors such as libraries, universities and world peace, and had only US$30 million left to his personal fortune when he died in 1919.
Carnegie is famous, not only for his extraordinary talent, but also for his principled life. It was he who wrote:
“The man who dies rich thus dies disgraced.”
In 1889, he wrote an article that came to known as "The Gospel of Wealth" in which the above condemnation appears, putting so many leading people of our time to shame. We can gain by considering key excerpts as so much of what he speaks about applies to the realm of business and commerce today. He starts:
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers.
The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today measures the change which has come with civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial. It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race, that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.
He highlights the benefits that accrue to society of opportunities for creating wealth but he also recognises it comes at a price:
The price we pay for this salutary change is, no doubt, great. We assemble thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All intercourse between them is at an end. Rigid castes are formed, and, as usual, mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust.
Each caste is without sympathy for the other, and ready to credit anything disparaging in regard to it. Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies, among which the rates paid to labor figure prominently, and often there is friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor. Human society loses homogeneity.
Though he strikes a positive note over the ability to deliver "cheap comforts and luxuries" to most people, Carnegie identifies what we know well today:
The price which society pays for the law of competition [... is] great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these.
'Violent or radical change'
However, Carnegie rejoices at the appearance of individuals like himself who have the capability to manouvre their way through the battlefield of business competition and in the process build great wealth.
He believes that preventing wealth to mount by sharing surplus capital with employees in higher wages is a waste of resources:
Even the poorest can be made to see this, and to agree that great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than if scattered among them through the course of many years in trifling amounts through the course of many years."Trifling amounts" are what higher wages may be to the rich in their "palace" but for the ordinary person it may be the difference between being able to pay the rent or mortgage, and being homeless.
Poor and restricted are our opportunities in this life; narrow our horizon; our best work most imperfect; but rich men should be thankful for one inestimable boon. They have it in their power during their lives to busy themselves in organizing benefactions from which the masses of their fellows will derive lasting advantage, and thus dignify their own lives.
The highest life is probably to be reached, not by such imitation of the life of Christ as Count Tolstoi gives us, but, while animated by Christ's spirit, by recognizing the changed conditions of this age, and adopting modes of expressing this spirit suitable to the changed conditions under which we live; still laboring for the good of our fellows, which was the essence of his life and teaching, but laboring in a different manner.
That's a welcome relief, that he sees himself and his rich peers acting in the loving spirit of Christ "for the good of our fellows", for what today we would term the common good. For this reason Carnegie calls on the generosity of the rich to serve the community, even nation, even world:
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
I wonder if Musk and Bezos see themselves as bound stewards of their wealth on behalf of humanity, or as free agents who divert a few billion here and there to salve their reputation and conscience. I would certainly say that Bill and Melinda Gates, along with Buffett, adhere to the concept of stewardship.
Judging the super-wealthy
As a man with a principled view of his place in society, Carnegie also provides standards on which we measure the super-wealthy of our day. With regards "good manners, good taste, or the rules of propriety" in general, he states that:
Public sentiment is quick to know and to feel what offends these. So in the case of wealth. The rule in regard to good taste in the dress of men or women applies here. Whatever makes one conspicuous offends the canon. If any family be chiefly known for display, for extravagance in home, table, equipage, for enormous sums ostentatiously spent in any form upon itself, if these be its chief distinctions, we have no difficulty in estimating its nature or culture.
So likewise in regard to the use or abuse of its surplus wealth, or to generous, freehanded cooperation in good public uses, or to unabated efforts to accumulate and hoard to the last, whether they administer or bequeath.
The verdict rests with the best and most enlightened public sentiment. The community will surely judge and its judgments will not often be wrong.
As with distributing personal wealth through higher wages, so too with almsgiving. Carnegie believed that more often than not in these cases it will be used unwisely. Therefore, the wealthy should select causes where their administrative expertise could be employed for optimal effect. He writes:
[We] know that the best means of benefiting the community is to place within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring can rise—parks, and means of recreation, by which men are helped in body and mind; works of art, certain to give pleasure and improve the public taste; and public institutions of various kinds, which will improve the general condition of the people; in this manner returning their surplus wealth to the mass of their fellows in the forms best calculated to do them lasting good.
Drawing to a close, Carnegie emphasises that full credit goes to the wealthy who see themselves as trustees of their fortune and set about dispensing funds to the best effect according to their knowledge of the public need:
He concludes by sympathising with the rich whose wealth is unable to be freed from their business but who intend it for public use, while pouring scorn on those who have the wealth available but do nothing with it:Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; intrusted for a season with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will thus have reached a stage in the development of the race which it is clearly seen that there is no mode of disposing of surplus wealth creditable to thoughtful and earnest men into whose hands it flows save by using it year by year for the general good. This day already dawns.
But a little while, and although, without incurring the pity of their fellows, men may die sharers in great business enterprises from which their capital cannot be or has not been withdrawn, and is left chiefly at death for public uses, yet the man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth, which was his to administer during life, will pass away "unwept, unhonored, and unsung", no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these the public verdict will then be: "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring "Peace on earth, among men good will."
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