My Kind of Billionaire…
It was a life well lived. He made a lot of moolah but he knew you can’t take it with you; hence, Charles “Chuck” Feeney, had one goal in mind after accumulating his billions: give it away.
And not “give it away” with much self-congratulatory hoopla advised by high-powered publicists trying to make it seem that he’s done something noble and special. No, Feeney just wanted to give it away.
He did succeed and on September 14th, 2020, he shut down Atlantic Philanthropies. It took him something like forty years to shower $8 billion dollars on a wide variety of necessary campaigns: from human rights to expanded health care to scientific research (among others).
Feeney and his wife Helga then retired to a modest apartment in San Francisco. He was happy as hell knowing that he wasn’t going to die a rich man.
I first learned about Feeney while penning blogs about the greedy financial set during a 2011/2012 tenure at American Banker. Intrigued, as I was, by a guy who grasped the real spiritual value of money I wrote the following piece:
Calculating Charity: Does PR Diminish the Value?
By Joel Sucher December 30, 2011, American Banker
