Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.

On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. 

Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in financial restitution alongside major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s decision that Musk failed to bring his lawsuit within the three-year statute of limitations, given that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. However, it’s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will still be enough to convince state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.

Lawyers tell me that Musk will likely choose to appeal the ruling, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But even beyond the outcome, the trial shone an often uncomfortable spotlight on the inner workings of Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Here are five major revelations from the trial.

OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty

Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.

Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required to vet a new AI model.

Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t

Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.

“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in one 2017 entry. “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”

Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.

Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with 

OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk emailed Brockman. 

Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard. 

At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests’ insistence that they share control of OpenAI — rather than cede absolute control to Musk — that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one “particularly hair-raising moment,” he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children. 

Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race

Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up. 

“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.

That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur city, as far as I was concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit. 

By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company’s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall. 

Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)

Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.

“We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” Musk testified, to apparent eyerolls from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential risks. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world.”

Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI’s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge. 

“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

Update, May 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the conclusion of the trial.

Earlier this year, a billionaire investor and philanthropist named Tom Kaplan auctioned off a small Rembrandt drawing of a lion at Sotheby’s in New York City. It sold for nearly $18 million. A press release prior to the auction noted that Kaplan would donate the proceeds of the sale to an environmental organization that he co-founded, called Panthera, which conserves wild cats like lions and jaguars. 

At face value, Kaplan’s gift is extraordinarily generous. Kaplan, owner of the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandts, is redeploying wealth that could have stayed locked up in a private collection or bank account to support the conservation of threatened felines and their habitats across the globe — all at a time when environmental causes are facing a massive funding shortfall. This seemed like a feel-good story all around. And that’s how it was pitched to me by a PR agency. 

My colleague Sara Herschander and I went to the auction in early February, and I spoke one-on-one with Kaplan the following week. I was expecting a fairly straightforward conversation about philanthropy and what he sees as the responsibility of billionaires, told through the lens of his recent gift. But instead, our chat exposed a more complicated and sometimes troubling side of big-money environmental giving. 

Kaplan became a billionaire through exploring for, mining, and investing in natural resources, including silver, gold, and natural gas. He remains active in metals mining to this day. Kaplan is the founder and chair of The Electrum Group, an investment firm focused on mining precious metals, and the chair of the gold mining company NovaGold Resources, which is developing a mine in Alaska that it expects to be the largest single gold mine in the US. 

That work sits awkwardly next to what Kaplan told me is his primary passion: wildlife conservation, and in particular, the big cats that Panthera works to protect. Mining is, by any measure, an unusually destructive industry for the environment and for wildlife. So I asked Kaplan: Does he see, in any way, his environmental philanthropy as a counterweight to the impact of his industry? 

It seemed an obvious question to me, but not to Kaplan. “You know, people don’t ask me these questions,” he told me over Zoom from a car. “First of all, I’m not going to spend time on educating you about why mining has a very, very tiny footprint when you compare it to agriculture and climate change. Everyone knows that if it’s a choice between my business and Panthera, I’m always choosing Panthera. With all due respect, I’m busy, so do you have anything [else] that you’d like to discuss?” 

I pressed further, explaining that the public often sees a tension between mining and conserving wildlife. “You’re wrong,” Kaplan told Vox. “Please don’t make things up. When you say this is the public tension, with all due respect, it doesn’t exist. You’re making it up. It’s a very hack journalist thing to say, ‘How do you answer, you know, the criticism of X, Y, and Z.’ I’ve never faced it, ever, nor should I have.”

Kaplan went on to say that mining has no detrimental impact on wild cats — a claim disputed by four mining experts we later interviewed. Mining metals can destroy habitat, leach chemicals into the environment, and accelerate other threats, such as deforestation, that in turn impact wild animals, including big cats. Panthera itself, the group Kaplan cofounded, lists mining as a threat to at least two wild feline species: the flat-headed cat and the Andean cat. Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), the global authority on endangered species, lists “mining and quarrying” as a threat to 19 cat species including jaguars, Andean cats, and tigers.

After I pressed Kaplan about the impact of his mining work, he said we could talk more about it another time. But when I reached out a week later to set something up, he declined. Vox shared a detailed list of our reporting with Kaplan before publishing this, and he declined to comment further.

The point is not that Kaplan’s particular mines are uniquely harmful within the broader extractive industry. They’re not — Kaplan appears to now operate primarily in North America, which means his mines are under a comparatively strict environmental regulatory regime. But there is no denying the fact that mining of any kind at scale has real, documented environmental impacts. (And for metals that are key to renewable energy technologies, those costs may be well worth paying.)

The point is that a man who has spent decades profiting from an industry that experts say harms wild animals — and who has also spent decades now giving tens of millions of dollars to protect them — doesn’t see any connection between the two. 

And he is not alone.

What our conversation highlighted is a bigger problem with environmental philanthropy. For every dollar spent to protect nature, the UN recently reported, more than $30 goes toward destroying it, largely from private industries like energy, agriculture, and mining. The giving, as generous as it sometimes seems, isn’t close to enough on its own. And the people writing the checks are often the same people making business decisions across industries that cause environmental harm in the first place — whether they acknowledge that fact or not.

An open secret in environmental philanthropy

Kaplan, of course, is not the only billionaire in this category.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is, perhaps, the most well-known example. He’s committed $10 billion to fighting climate change and protecting nature through his Bezos Earth Fund, a foundation. (His net worth, as of this writing, is about $275 billion.) At the same time, his company produces an extraordinary amount of carbon and plastic pollution — which is fueling some of the same problems Earth Fund seeks to fix. 

Meanwhile, the billionaire owners of MSC, the world’s largest shipping company, use philanthropy to help restore coral reefs. And yet MSC produces more carbon emissions each year than a small European country, and carbon emissions are a leading threat to reefs globally.

Kjell Inge Røkke, the billionaire chair behind Aker ASA, an investment firm focused in part on oil and gas exploration, has donated some of his wealth to clean the ocean of plastic. Plastic is, of course, made from oil. 

It’s not exactly surprising that these sorts of big-money philanthropists might insulate themselves from uncomfortable contradictions, whether they do so purposefully or not, said Stephen Prince, a multimillionaire who made his fortune from a gift-card printing company. As the wealthy get wealthier, he told Vox, they become “increasingly enshrouded in a bubble of protection that allows them to ignore reality.” Prince, who’s vice-chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people calling for higher taxes on themselves, ditched his private jet in 2023 because of its enormous environmental footprint. 

A number of philanthropy experts we spoke to echoed this view — that philanthropists tend to avoid addressing the tensions between their source of wealth and their charitable giving. “What you’re describing is very, very common,” said Glen Galaich, author of the recent book Control: Why Big Giving Falls Short, and CEO of the Stupski Foundation. (The foundation is rooted in the wealth of Larry Stupski, the former president and chief operating officer of Charles Schwab Corp.)

But among the financial elite, ignoring reality has far-reaching consequences. When billionaires fail to reckon with this contradiction — between their source of wealth and the target of their donations — they can indulge in a kind of feel-good eco-savior complex while attention is diverted from the much bigger environmental problems that they perpetuate. 

Truly fixing those problems, such as rising temperatures and rates of extinction, requires enormous reforms in industries like agriculture, energy, and mining. It’s hard to see that happening if industry leaders who care about nature don’t acknowledge their own culpability, no matter how much money they donate to charity. 

“The philanthropy world is quite keen to put so much weight on what they’re giving, but they minimize what they’re taking,” said Jessie Bluedorn, a young philanthropist and environmental organizer, referring to the environmental exploits of philanthropists. 

Rich by inheritance from a family fortune made largely in the HVAC industry, Bluedorn funds climate justice organizations through her foundation, the Carmack Collective. She sees her philanthropy as a form of wealth redistribution. “People need to be a bit more honest about the balance sheet of their contribution to our society,” she said.

It should be said that billionaires don’t have to donate anything. A mining mogul could just mine and mine and not support philanthropic causes, whether environmental or not. Many of them do. From one perspective — long the dominant one in philanthropy — choosing to support a cause like wildlife conservation instead of making oneself that much richer is generous. Donating the proceeds from a beloved $18 million drawing is generous. 

It’s also true that choosing to be a philanthropist can open up a billionaire to criticism that their less generous peers don’t face. There are dozens of billionaires on the Forbes Billionaires List whom you’ve probably never heard of, perhaps because they’re not giving money away publicly. And sure, billionaires may donate, in part, because they’re chasing positive attention. But those who privately hoard wealth do less good in the world while more easily avoiding accusations of hypocrisy.

Put another way, “the folks who are super interested in destroying everything aren’t philanthropists,” said Tamara Toles O’Laughlin, CEO of the Environmental Grantmakers Association. EGA is a network of over 200 private foundations, most of which are funded by wealthy families, that support environmental causes. 

Meanwhile, many philanthropists are “breaking their backs to figure out how they can change their relationship to the money they got and what that money is going to do,” O’Laughlin said. 

And there’s another important point: Environmental groups could really use the cash. In 2023, less than 2 percent of global philanthropy — a high-end estimate of $15.8 billion — went toward mitigating climate change, according to the ClimateWorks Foundation. That’s compared to the $78 billion that US higher education reeled in last year. At the same time, the Trump administration has yanked loads of federal funds for conservation and climate groups. (Government grants, however, typically make up a smaller share of an environmental nonprofit’s budget, relative to philanthropy.) 

Senowa Mize-Fox, a climate justice organizer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, is a sharp critic of the kind of donors who give to climate-related causes without addressing their own, sometimes troubling environmental records. “These billionaires are so self-absorbed, and so far removed from the reality of the majority of people on this planet, that they think that…giving that money away is going to solve everything,” she said. “It’s not. It will not. It never will.” 

But even Mize-Fox has at times opted to accept money from imperfect donors. In a previous job, the organizations she worked with got a big grant opportunity from Bezos Earth Fund. 

“It is all blood money, and the faster that we can divest from the billionaires and reinvest that money into frontline solutions is what matters to me,” Mize-Fox said, noting that most wealth is tied to some kind of exploitation, whether it was last year or 100 years ago.

So then, does it really matter where the money came from if it’s put to good use? 

A new generation of climate advocates — and some philanthropists themselves — are starting to think so. 

A slow reckoning is underway

In the last decade or so, some billionaire donors and their foundations have finally begun to grapple more explicitly with the source of their wealth and the harm it’s caused, often with the help of donor advocacy groups like Patriotic Millionaires and Resource Generation. 

Perhaps the clearest example is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. It’s one of several foundations started by heirs to John D. Rockefeller’s gigantic Standard Oil fortune. In 2014, the fund pledged to divest its endowment from fossil fuels like coal and tar sands. Its aim was to align its investment practices with the climate justice efforts it has supported since the 1990s. 

In 2020, the much larger Rockefeller Foundation similarly decided to untangle its endowment from fossil fuels. It was a remarkable statement from an organization founded from a $100 million cut — worth about $3.3 billion in today’s dollars — of one of history’s largest oil fortunes.

“The weight of this legacy is not lost on us,” Chan Lai, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief investment officer, told Vox in a statement. The divestment was “in part a form of accountability,” he said, for the source of the Rockefellers’ fortune.

A number of other major foundations have similarly decided to divest from fossil fuels, spurred in part by the murder of George Floyd. Protests in 2020 pushed grantmakers to more publicly acknowledge the damaging roots of their riches, fund more climate justice work led by people of color, and align their endowments — the investment funds they use to grow their wealth — with their charitable missions.

Some living billionaires have made similar moves. California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer has spoken publicly about his pivot from investing in fossil fuels to funding climate solutions. 

“I went from being somebody who was blithely investing in everything in the economy to, ‘No, no, no, no, that’s not okay,’” he said in a recent interview on the podcast Heated. “And I need to leave billions of dollars on the table to make sure that I’m actually doing the right thing.”

More than a decade ago, Nicky Oppenheimer, Africa’s fourth-richest person and heir to the massive De Beers diamond fortune, sold his family’s $5.1 billion stake. Since then, he’s invested heavily in wildlife conservation.

Is giving enough?

Given the sheer scale of environmental problems — and the gaping hole in funding to fix them — it is, perhaps, a terrible idea to criticize any environmental philanthropist. Vox, itself, relies on grant funding for some of our environmental coverage, including this very piece. Implying that a philanthropist could do more for the planet when they’re already donating a lot is, as Kaplan put it in our call, “an unusual take on things.” 

Yet that response, again, belies a more fundamental issue. The economic system we live in today, which billionaires help perpetuate, is not working. For the roughly $220 billion spent to save nature in 2023, more than $7 trillion went to activities that destroy it, such as subsidies for fossil fuels, according to a recent UN report.  

Environmental philanthropy comes nowhere close to balancing the scales — especially if it does nothing to shrink the larger half of that equation. To borrow an analogy from groups fighting plastic waste, it’s like trying to mop up from an overflowing bathtub without turning off the faucet.  

To truly solve the world’s big environmental problems, harmful industries need to change the way they do business. They need to redirect financial flows that dwarf philanthropy toward less harmful activities — from mining coal to building solar panels, from cutting trees for cattle to investing in plant-based protein. 

“Foundations in the US give away a grand total of $100 billion a year,” Galaich, the Stupski Foundation executive director, told Vox. “[But we] are talking about multitrillion-dollar problems.”

Just ask Bezos, who told CNBC in an interview this month: “If I do my job right, the value to society and civilization from my for-profit companies will be much, much larger than the good that I do with my charitable giving.” Bezos was referring to the value he sees generated by companies like Amazon and his space tech company Blue Origin, which may be debatable, but the point is that the scale of for-profit industry is so great that what is done there matters more than what can be done in philanthropy.

Maybe the companies that Kaplan has invested in are leading the way in sustainability — in making the metal mining industry less harmful to ecosystems and the cats that he adores. The gold company he chairs has a whole page dedicated to its environmental efforts. That’s a question we planned to ask him in a follow-up conversation, though answering it would have required being open to the contradictions at the heart of so much environmental philanthropy. 

Ultimately, it’s hard to understand how an industry will stop creating environmental problems if even its leaders who are most passionate about the environment — so much so that they are giving away their prized possessions for it — don’t first acknowledge that they exist.

Correction, May 26, 12:15 pm: A previous version of this story misstated Glen Galaich’s title. He is the CEO of the Stupski Foundation.

It’s official. Elon Musk is now the world’s first-ever trillionaire, after his rocket ship company SpaceX’s record-shattering $2 trillion debut on the NASDAQ last Friday.

With a mind-numbing net fortune of $1.4 trillion that is growing by the day, Musk is now worth more than the entire economy of Switzerland. He is more than 13 times as wealthy as Bill Gates, and if you are anywhere near middle class, he is over 11 million times wealthier than you. He’s rich enough to collectively purchase every seat for every single World Cup match, every stub in every city on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and every ticket at every Broadway show for the next 10 years or so, while barely making a dent in his gargantuan fortune. 

One significant caveat here: The vast majority of Musk’s wealth is wrapped up in equity in his companies, not in cash, in much the same way most Americans’ wealth is tied up in their homes. While the dollar figure has 12 zeros attached, there’d be no way for Musk to convert all or even most of it into cash, Scrooge McDuck-style, without tanking the value of the companies. (In the case of SpaceX, he’s legally barred from selling any stock for 366 days after the IPO.) Don’t feel too bad for him, though: Billionaires — sorry, trillionaires — like Musk tend to borrow most of the money they spend, rather than selling off their investments, which doubles as a nifty way to avoid paying taxes. 

In other words, even if Musk doesn’t actually have a trillion dollars sitting in a vault, he still has reasonable access to an obscene amount of money, enough to easily outspend any political campaign in the US, or — as he joked on X on Monday — install the volcano lair he’s always dreamt of. 

On the eve of becoming a trillionaire, Musk told Peter Diamandis, head of the Xprize Foundation — one of the few charities Musk has ever appeared to give significant support to — that he doesn’t really believe in money anymore, that AI will soon “make so much stuff” that virtually everything will be freely available, and everyone will eventually just get a universal basic income that they can spend on whatever they need.

For now, though, money is still our main means of exchange for goods and services, and Musk has access to more money than he could ever spend.  And that means he has an opportunity to share his ballooning fortune. 

Unfortunately, Musk is a notoriously terrible philanthropist. 

Though he once pledged to donate away most of his fortune, Musk gives only a minuscule fraction of his net worth to charity each year, much of it funneled through a secretive charitable foundation that was fined three years in a row by the Internal Revenue Service for hoarding cash. The (only comparatively) far less well-off Gates has given away over $100 billion, or over 20 percent of his wealth, to charity so far, while Musk had given away less than 1 percent prior to becoming a trillionaire. 

And while he is prone to the occasional lofty promise — to solve world hunger, fix the Flint water crisis, or cover TSA workers’ salaries during the last government shutdown — he never made good on any of those vows. Instead, he spent much of last year taking a chainsaw to lifesaving USAID programs, the loss of which has since been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world. 

It seems unlikely that becoming a trillionaire will make Musk soft. Nonetheless, if Musk really cares about humanity, there are a few things he could do: 

1. Pull hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty

According to an analysis released last year, it would cost just $318 billion annually to put an end to the worst form of poverty worldwide. 

By distributing just over one-quarter of his net worth, Musk could ensure that one-eighth of the world’s population had enough food to eat each day, a safe shelter to sleep in, and water that’s clean enough to drink. At his current level, he would still have about a trillion to spare, and at the rate his wealth keeps growing, it’s likely he could keep up the effort for years to come. 

2. Pay off all medical debt in the United States

About one American in three has a past-due medical bill, the kind of entirely involuntary, often predatory debt that can quickly turn a cancer diagnosis into a bankruptcy. The roughly $220 billion Americans owe in medical debt today drives families into food insecurity and leaves many avoiding care in the first place for fear of unpayable costs. 

Though Musk insists the robots his companies are developing will soon replace surgeons and revolutionize access to medical care, he could start improving American health care by simply covering the bill.

3. Bankroll universal preschool

Many American parents spend tens of thousands of dollars every year — often upward of 15 percent of their income — on childcare costs. But as my colleague Anna North often writes, momentum has been growing for universal preschool programs, which — when implemented well — can have major benefits for kids and working families. 

The price tag for building such a program nationally? About $351 billion over 10 years, according to economists at the University of Pennsylvania, including the construction of new facilities. At that rate, Musk could pay for over three decades’ worth of it.

4. Climate-proof the world

Roughly half of the world’s population — 4.1 billion people — lives somewhere at risk from the most hazardous effects of climate change, including heat waves, droughts, and rising sea levels. Many of those people live in low- or middle-income countries that can’t afford the kind of cooling systems, flooding protection, and irrigation strategies they need to stay safe. 

The annual cost of making sure that every country can adapt to these new extreme weather realities? $1.2 trillion, or just about all of Musk’s net worth.

5. End world hunger

A few years ago, Musk pledged to sell off $6 billion worth of Tesla stock to support the World Food Program if it could offer him an exact accounting of its claim that such a donation could bankroll an end to the most severe forms of global hunger. Within days, the WFP responded with a detailed plan on how to use $6.6 billion to feed 42 million people on the brink of starvation. Musk, though, never followed through. 

In reality, putting an outright end to world hunger would cost considerably more than $6 billion. Even so, the United Nations believes it would cost just about $93 billion annually to end global hunger by 2030, a total cost of $465 billion or just about a third of Musk’s net worth.  

6. Research cures for cancer and other diseases

If you want a cure for cancer, a vaccine against dementia, or just about anything else worth discovering, then you need to fund scientific research. In 2023, the US invested about $993 billion in research and development, which includes new medical breakthroughs.

With his wealth, Musk could more than make up for the billions in federal science funding that the Trump administration cut last year, potentially leading to breakthroughs that might otherwise stall out.

7. Bring everyone clean drinking water

Over 4 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water at home, which puts them at risk for dangerous waterborne diseases such as cholera and dysentery.

Giving people safe drinking water and sanitation services involves building better pipes, filtration systems, and well networks. It would cost about $114 billion per year to bring clean water to everyone in the world, according to the United Nations. Musk could fund that effort by himself for a decade or more.

8. End homelessness in America

Musk could easily pay for decades’ worth of housing solutions to the nation’s homelessness and affordability crises. Most estimates put the cost of ending homelessness in the United States — which affects about 770,000 Americans at any given time — at somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion each year. 

He could also opt to make an enormous dent in the nation’s housing shortage, which is a root cause of homelessness. The Council for American Progress estimates that it would cost about $95 billion over five years to construct the 2 million homes needed to close the supply gap. 

9. Wipe out tuberculosis and malaria for good

Tuberculosis is the world’s deadliest infectious disease, infecting about 10 million people and killing about 1.5 million every year. Eradicating tuberculosis by 2030 would cost about $250 billion, far more than the under $6 billion spent on prevention and treatment in 2024. 

Musk could use a fraction of his fortune to bankroll an end to TB. While he’s at it, he could stop malaria, too, which would cost an estimated $8.5 billion per year to eradicate. 

10. Give everyone in the world a check for $146

Here’s a simple one. If just $1.2 trillion of Musk’s net worth (let’s leave the guy a little something!) was divided equally among the world’s 8.2 billion people, everyone would receive a $146 check. In the United States, that’s enough for a week or so of groceries or most of an annual Netflix subscription. 

But in other countries, a check like that could be life-changing. In Zambia, where most people live off of less than $2 per day, that one eight-billionth-of-a-dollar slice of Musk’s pie could cover a few months’ worth of necessities, school fees, and housing costs.

Shortly after brandishing his infamous chainsaw on a conservative conference stage last February, Elon Musk attended a Cabinet meeting where, giggling slyly, he admitted to having “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention in his haste to obliterate the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he added coolly at the time, “and there was no interruption.” That claim has since proven to be disastrously, profoundly untrue. 

On May 17, the World Health Organization declared a rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda a “public health emergency of international concern,” only the ninth-ever time the agency has made that designation. In the weeks since, at least 220 people have died of the highly fatal virus, and more than 900 suspected cases have been identified so far. It is already the third-largest Ebola outbreak on record.

And yet, that toll is likely a tremendous undercount because, as the New York Times reported from the ground this week, “only a trickle of tests are being processed every day” in the cities most affected by the outbreak. “The virus is far ahead of us,” Ahmed Mahat, a manager with International Medical Corps, told the Times. “And it’s spreading fast.”

In fact, publicly known cases are rising exponentially faster than in any prior outbreak, including the largest ever, West Africa’s catastrophic outbreak in 2014, and the second-largest in 2018. By the time this outbreak was declared, hundreds of people had already been infected.

When you stop looking, you can’t see

Why did this outbreak spread so quickly? Part of it was the virus itself, a rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, which is harder to diagnose and for which there are no vaccines or treatments. (At least, not yet.) Another reason is that this outbreak began in a remote province of eastern Congo, an active war zone, where what health systems exist have been ravaged by decades of armed conflict. 

As if the odds weren’t already stacked enough, however, this outbreak broke out under the heavy shadow of US foreign aid cuts that, among other calamities, gutted the world’s Ebola detection and response apparatus last year. Despite Musk’s earlier assurances, US-funded programs to detect new Ebola cases and dispatch a response were indeed frozen under the Trump administration, according to Stat. US cuts also indirectly contributed to the outbreak by weakening local health systems and stockpiles. 

Altogether, the US Department of Health and Human Services disbursed about $10 million to Congo last year, down from $33 million the year prior, Stat noted. USAID sent $693 million in aid to Congo last year, down from nearly $1.2 billion in 2024. 

Cuts to disease surveillance meant that this virus took longer to identify than it should have. And with cuts to local health systems, it’s now much harder to come by the tests, nurses, doctors, and protective equipment needed to stop the spread. 

“It’s so bad. It’s so bad,” Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told Devex. The Africa CDC’s role in quelling outbreaks has become even more important as wealthy countries have retreated from the global health stage, but it is impossible to fill all of the medical surveillance gaps left by the US withdrawal of support, he said. “No one can give you the magnitude of this outbreak.”

Bleeding out

The US has done some course correction since the outbreak began. Last week, the State Department pledged $23 million in emergency funding for Congo and Uganda, plus the deployment of a disaster response team and enhanced involvement from the CDC, which says it’s been actively coordinating with local health agencies. At least some lost funding should have also begun flowing back to both countries through their bilateral aid deals with the US. 

But when you lose a limb to a chainsaw — even a “chainsaw of bureaucracy” like the one Musk dragged across a stage — you can’t expect a bandaid to make up for the damage. Beyond the money, the US withdrawal from the WHO and other policy decisions have had a deeply destabilizing effect on global health systems, which no doubt helped bungle this outbreak response. In many cases, the disease experts and researchers who were once in charge are simply not there anymore. 

Given the outbreak’s virulence so far, things will probably get significantly worse before they get better. While the majority of cases have occurred in Congo so far, Robert Redfield, former head of the CDC, predicted last week that the virus could soon spread to neighboring countries like Tanzania and South Sudan. Researchers have rapidly begun development on a new vaccine for the deadly virus, but even in a very best-case scenario, it will take months to roll out. In the meantime, health workers will continue to play catch-up to a virus that now has a massive head start.

As Nicholas Enrich, the former top global health official for USAID, told the New York Times last week: “In a time when hours matter, we’re delayed by weeks.”

“Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.”

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. Gates had been challenged by Mark Zuckerberg, who’d been challenged by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with whom Zuckerberg had appeared on Oprah a few years prior to announce a $100 million donation to Newark schools. 

By the time Musk tweeted out a video of his kids drenching him with their own makeshift ice bucket gizmo a day after Gates, the challenge had already reached tens of millions of people worldwide. Among the participants were Jeff Bezos, Justin Bieber, David Lynch — and Donald Trump.

As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. 

In the early 2010s, platforms like Facebook “actually had the potential to be this century’s agora, a marketplace of ideas,” said Asha Curran, who co-founded GivingTuesday, a philanthropic counterweight to Black Friday, in 2012. “The social media environment wasn’t this sort of existential threat to our mental health and our democracy and our isolation that it is now.”

But it wasn’t just a different era for social media. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99 percent alike, and Bill Gates — alongside both his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett — was influencer number one. In 2010, the Gateses and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the ultra-wealthy to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. At the campaign’s peak, about one in seven American billionaires — including Musk, Zuckerberg, and a broad swath of the country’s rising tech billionaire class — pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. Together, they promised to usher in a new golden age of philanthropy.

They also aimed to inspire giving from Americans of more modest means, who flocked to viral clicktivism campaigns while sporting TOMS shoes and (PRODUCT)RED iPod nanos. The idea was seductive: You too could help save the world while making a show of your generosity. 

Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. 

For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad.

It’s no wonder today’s youths yearn for the hopecore, the millennial optimism, of the early 2010s, that mediascape of messy buns, post-recession electropop, and sincere posting about causes everyone cared about for a week or two. The internet’s Earnest Era propelled a culture of giving even among billionaires, who shared a fear of missing out on the next hashtag cause. But today’s more fractured internet has kneecapped that positivity. To some degree, it made even the idea of trying to save the world cringe. The problem is not so much a giving crisis, as it is an attention crisis, one that’s been exacerbated by rising inequality and the decline of generosity as a collective cultural value, the kind of virtue worth signaling. 

“For a while, you almost needed to pick a charity as part of your online persona,” said Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned founder of Charity: Water, a celebrity darling back when “it was really cool” to give in the early 2010s. He has struggled to fundraise in recent years. “It’s not on trend. It’s not what people are doing. It phased out. The cycle ended.”

I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad

2010 was a transformative year for generosity for two important reasons: The economy had passed through the very worst of the Great Recession, and for the very first time, more Americans were about to be on social media than off of it. 

Surveys of young people in the early 2010s showed that they were stubbornly, discordantly optimistic despite graduating into underemployment.

One of those millennials was Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 was named Time’s person of the year at 26 years old for building a platform “fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels.”

Social media made the world feel smaller. When a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January of that year, it became the first major live-tweeted natural disaster. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean were among those soliciting their followers for donations in the aftermath of the quake. Within a week, Jean’s own charity raised $2 million and the Red Cross raised $8 million. Celebrities released a “We Are the World” charity cover, and Americans ultimately gave about 15.3 percent more to international aid that year than they did the year prior. 

People who donated told their friends about it — publicly, online — and they told their friends about it in turn, in a charitable daisy chain that thrived under newly digitized social pressures. If you told the internet about your good deed, you’d look cool. If you were the only one of your friends who didn’t, well, you’d look like a bit of a jerk, in a much more visible way than in the past. 

Then, on June 16, 2010, news broke of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s plan to ask the nation’s billionaires to commit to giving away half of their fortunes. One week later, the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song “Billionaire” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was an ode to getting rich not just to get rich, but to give it all away: “Not a single tummy around me would know what hungry was, eatin’ good, sleepin’ soundly.” 

By 2014, the Giving Pledge had 130 signatories, amounting to one in seven of the country’s billionaires, the majority of whom shared their motivations for joining in public letters online.

“People signed it because it was the cool thing to do,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog that advocates for progressive practices in the philanthropic sector.

The Giving Pledge was perhaps the single biggest manifestation of philanthro-capitalism, or the idea that “rich people can save the world” by applying their business acumen to charitable causes, was “all the rage” at the time, he said. While the pledge was not legally binding — and came with few expectations — most signatories “honestly believed they were going to live up to the terms.”

While the rest of the world heaped praise on the Pledgers, Dorfman wrote a series of articles in the Huffington Post critiquing the Giving Pledge when it was first announced. “I remember thinking this is insane. Everybody thinks this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread and it’s just not,” he told me recently. At the time, he believed that the way billionaires gave was too slow and self-serving to actually make a dent in serious global problems. “There’s no way it can possibly make that much of a difference.”

How to #SaveTheWorld, one hashtag at a time

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only millennial to believe he could save the world. 

Facebook, and other platforms like it, helped inspire a boom in viral kindness and giving campaigns in the early 2010s. While celebrities often acted as superspreaders — some, like Justin Bieber, signed a “Hollywood Pledge” modeled after the Giving Pledge in 2011— social media was not the influencer-dominated, algorithmized cesspool it is today.

When Curran helped launch GivingTuesday in 2012, “it immediately crossed what today we would think of as algorithmic bubbles,” she said. The White House blogged about it, and #GivingTuesday quickly became a top trending topic on Twitter. That first year, the hashtag raised at least $10 million for charity in 24 hours, a 53 percent spike from the year prior. 

“The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

Asha Curran, GivingTuesday

“We were catching a wave,” Curran said. “The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

That same year, over 1 million men grew mustaches — and raised over $100 million — for Movember’s annual men’s health awareness campaign, driven in part by a PSA starring the mustachioed actor Nick Offerman. The charity Invisible Children went viral for its 30-minute YouTube video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, kindling the #Kony2012 craze, a campaign now chiefly remembered for being offensive and ineffective. 

Few charities mastered social media quite as successfully as Charity: Water, which gained a huge following in part by flying tech entrepreneurs to Ethiopia and convincing celebrities to share their birthday fundraisers. Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith kicked off the trend in 2010, and a year later Justin Bieber asked his Beliebers to donate $17 each for his 17th birthday. By 2013, Charity: Water had raised over $100 million from thousands of people online, enough to build over 8,000 wells and other clean water projects. 

“The beauty was the average birthday fundraiser brought in 10 of their friends and family,” Harrison said. “It almost had an implied virality, and it cost us nothing.” 

By the time a majority of Americans had smartphones in 2013, the internet was being flooded with selfies and short video trends. (Rest in six seconds of peace, Vine.) The Norwegian Army danced to the Harlem Shake in the snow. And golfers were drenching themselves with cold water as a way to bring attention to their favorite charities online. 

In July 2014, one of those golfers, a man named Chris Kennedy, poured a bucket of ice water on his head for the ALS Association, and then challenged his cousin, whose husband had the disease. She accepted, and the videos began pulsating through her social networks until they reached Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both young ALS advocates.

From there, “it just continued to snowball,” said Brian Frederick, who the ALS Association brought on to help manage the trend. Over 17 million people participated that summer. “There was a period in August where for eight straight days, we were raising over $10 million a day.” The association had to reserve an entire office in its headquarters just to store all of the checks that people were sending in. 

The association raised about $115 million in just eight weeks, money that helped fund 130 research projects in 12 different countries. But while social media moves at light speed, medical research is a bit slower. Only in recent years have ALS patients begun to see breakthroughs in treatment from that enormous infusion of funding for a rare disease that most Americans had never heard of before 2014. By the time their donations started to pay off, most of them had likely forgotten whatever they’d once known about the disease.

“It dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS. It led to new genes being discovered, new research collaborations, new treatments in the pipeline,” said Frederick, but for most people who soaked themselves with icy water that summer, “that was just a one-time thing for them. They’ll never know that they really did make a difference.”

When generosity became cringe

The ice bucket challenge was the last real do-gooder social media trend of its kind. 

A week after it started coursing through the internet, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, drawing an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media. Both the #IceBucketChallenge and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the hashtag most associated with the protests that followed Brown’s killing, proliferated explosively and “almost simultaneously” across the internet, the writer Jia Tolentino noted at the time, yet they spread “entirely discreetly: twinned channels of wildfire blazing through quadrants of your attention that barely touch.”

Cracks were beginning to show in an internet that would soon become irrevocably siloed, one where digital attention, which felt so boundless and empowering earlier that decade, would come to feel like a precious commodity, monetized and increasingly stretched thin. With the Ferguson protests, that shift coincided with a massive political awakening and major domestic unrest and anger. To some corners of the internet, the performance of mass apolitical acts of generosity began to feel like an irreconcilable distraction in a competition for finite attention. 

As a result, the viral monoculture of the early 2010s fractured, giving way to an internet driven less by personal connections and more by hyper-targeted algorithms designed to keep you scrolling. “I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore,” Ethan Zuckerman, a digital media scholar and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. “They feel trapped by them. They feel like they want to escape these tools.” 

The vibe shifted, and the internet’s new feeds rarely rewarded the kind of mass earnestness that drove engagement on early social media platforms.

“I wish that I had known that it was the last time so that I could have marked it in my mind,” Curran said. “I’m not sure that a Giving Tuesday could work if it were launched today.” 

“I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore. They feel trapped by them.”

Ethan Zuckerman, University of Massachusetts at Amherst

That’s not to say that people aren’t generous anymore. But they are significantly less likely to give to charity than they used to: Fewer than half of American households donate at all these days, down from 66 percent in 2000. Those who do give give an average of 1.2 percent of their income, down from nearly 2 percent in 2017. 

America’s richest families have given more to charity in total dollars over the past decade — enough, in fact, to make up for the decline in everyday donors and then some. But as a percentage of their ballooning wealth, most billionaires — including those who signed the Giving Pledge — appear to be giving less to charity than they used to. 

Rising inequality — and the belief that the wealthier should donate instead — explains part of this decline for everyday Americans, among other factors. But it also reflects a broader pattern in which Americans have largely moved away from performing their giving, or earnestness more broadly, at least online. It’s just not swaggy anymore; it doesn’t give you the insane aura that it used to. 

“These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

Scott Harrison, Charity: water

“It’s not in my feed. You’re not getting hit up for charities from your friends the same way you were,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you the last celebrity that was in my feed asking me to give to their favorite charity, it’s been years. They are selling lipstick. They are selling protein powders. These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

GivingTuesday is actually a much bigger movement today than it was in 2012, raising about $4 billion last year, but it’s no longer primarily a social media phenomenon. “Neighbor-to-neighbor generosity is more important than ever because that’s the way you escape the algorithmic bubble,” Curran said. “You almost have to get offline entirely.” Americans who do give online increasingly do so through ever more individualized channels like GoFundMe, which got its start in 2010, but has exploded in popularity in recent years. More than three-quarters of Americans say they believe that political polarization has made people more reluctant to give, and 60 percent said they’ve personally shied away from charitable activities that may involve people with opposing political views. In the absence of a shared civic culture, deeply siloed — and often distrusted — platforms like GoFundMe have become many Americans’ chosen way to give.

And where have the billionaires been? For the most part, accumulating wealth far faster than they gave it away. Zuckerberg, who once critiqued philanthropists for waiting until old age to fork up their fortunes, has seen his wealth increase by over 4,000 percent since signing the Giving Pledge, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. That $100 million for Newark schools that he announced on Oprah to such fanfare in 2010? It’s now widely regarded as a colossal failure built on a foundation of philanthro-capitalist buzzwords instead of actual community needs. A few weeks after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration and appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic initiative announced that it would stop funding causes like education reform and social justice last year. While Zuckerberg gives much more in total charity today than he did 15 years ago, he gives far less as a percentage of his wealth. Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Newark in 2010, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of his net worth at the time. Last year, he and his wife donated $608 million, but it amounted to just 0.3 percent of his now gargantuan fortune.

In recent years, a cadre of right-wing billionaires led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has also begun to actively denigrate the Pledge for what they see as a left-wing bias, despite the fact that it has always been intentionally apolitical. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel, who accused the Pledge of being an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club,” told the New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join,” he said, claiming that some Pledgers feel “blackmailed” to stay on the list once they sign.

As the rest of America has stratified and become more partisan, so too have the nation’s billionaires. And apolitical promises, like sheer generosity itself, just don’t hold the same allure that they used to. 

“Peter Thiel used to be an outlier, but now many tech billionaires are coming together around this radical anti-social” worldview, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires. “They’re opting out of the social institutions that the rest of us depend on.”

You say performative like it’s a bad thing

Craig Newmark is not like those other tech billionaires. The founder of Craigslist is not and has never been a billionaire at all, he says, despite what Forbes might have to say about it. 

“I am a peasant at heart,” he told me, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times defending the Pledge against its partisan detractors. “My favorite luxury at my age is a walk-in shower with grab bars.” 

Newmark is a new recruit, having only signed the Giving Pledge himself last December. He was already a prolific philanthropist, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to military families, cybersecurity, pigeon rescue, and my alma mater. So why add his name now? 

“It seemed to me that signing up for it would be funny,” he said, referring to the “absurd” idea that a “nerd patient zero” like himself could rub shoulders in an elite philanthropy club. “Funny is highly motivating for me. I know I’m not as funny as I think I am, but given the toxicity of our culture these days, anything funny is highly welcome.”

When I pressed him, Newmark conceded that signing the Pledge was also his way of “putting a stake in the ground.” Seeing other billionaires pull away from giving now is “disappointing,” he said, “because the world needs people who have too much money to pitch in” to help improve people’s lives at a time of vast inequality. “There are Americans who are going hungry,” he said, and “that kind of pisses me off.”

But primarily, he insists, he’s just trying to be funny. “We all need positive entertainment these days.”

And maybe that’s the point, because the Giving Pledge, like the ice bucket challenge and #Movember, was built on performance. Newmark is now engaging in that performance with the kind of wry, ironic humor befitting of today’s internet culture, rather than the gravitas and sincerity of the Pledge’s early years. But it was always, to some extent, a performative spectacle. While some signatories have turned out to be extraordinarily generous — MacKenzie Scott and Laura and John Arnold come to mind — there’s little evidence that the Pledge has accelerated their giving or made the ultra-wealthy more charitable as a cohort. 

Having skimmed through dozens of early Pledger letters, I’ve found that many claimed to have already been well on their way to giving it all away prior to making a public commitment. “Until now, I have done this giving quietly,” wrote Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in 2010. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to,” he wrote, for the purpose of “‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

The Pledge’s original 2010 signatories — including Gates and Zuckerberg —  have donated about $206 billion as of last year, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, most of which went into their private foundations and DAFs, which slowly dole out grants to charity. The Arnolds are the only living original signatories to have given away enough to fulfil their Pledge, and of the 22 Pledgers who have died since 2010, only eight fulfilled their promise to give away at least half of their wealth during their respective lifetimes or in their wills. At the rate that Musk and Ellison are going — they’ve given away 0.06 percent and 0.03 percent of their wealth, respectively, according to Forbes — it seems unlikely that today’s living Pledgers will fare much better. And they’re in good company. Four in five of the wealthiest 400 Americans have given away less than 5 percent of their fortunes as of last year, most under 1 percent.  

Likewise, only about one-fifth of those who participated in the ice bucket challenge actually donated to the fight against ALS. The one in five who did donate gave about $220 million to ALS worldwide, and $115 million to the ALS Association, which raised about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior. While there was a genuine desire to help people through the trend, at the same time, Frederick said, the majority of people were “just doing what their friends were doing.” 

@brookemonk_

The #uscicebucketchallange is rasing awareness for such an important topic. Please don’t be afraid to speak up 🫶 You have 24hrs @Cassie @leah halton @Sam Dezz

♬ original sound – Brooke Monk

They were virtue signaling, but that’s not such a bad thing — philanthropy, after all, can do good no matter the intention behind the giving. An internet where people feel the need to do charity stunts for clout en masse is still better than one that rewards you for trying to hammer yourself a better jawline. On the rare occasion that earnestness does go viral today, as it did during the Artemis II launch or after Alysa Liu’s ebullient free skate routine, “it just makes me long for a time when communal awe was more prevalent than it is now,” said Curran. But while today’s social media tends to reinforce the idea that Americans “hopelessly hate each other,” she said, “if you get down to the community level, you actually see all these really beautiful things happening.”

Last year, a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina decided to revive the ice bucket challenge as a fundraiser for youth mental health. They hoped to raise $100, maybe $200, Alison Malmon, founder and executive director of the charity Active Minds, told me. 

Most of the students were barely out of preschool when the first ice bucket challenge went viral. But suddenly, college kids, beauty influencers, and celebrities were once again racking up views by drenching themselves in frigid water online. The revived ice bucket challenge raised over $500,000 for Active Minds. It never came close to its predecessor’s stratospheric levels of popularity — things just don’t go viral like they used to anymore — but it did, for a moment, revive a sense of earnest do-gooderism that, for over a decade, felt increasingly relegated to the internet’s far fringes. 

The phrase millennial optimism was born a few months later, driven by nostalgia for a bygone and vaguely naive internet culture that most young adults today are old enough to remember, but young enough to romanticize. So far, there’s no indication that Gen Z’s rediscovery of indie sleaze portends a sustained, serious resurgence of viral earnestness culture, from billionaires or from the rest of us. But as MGMT would put it, maybe now it really is time to pretend.

Ismail Harerimana grew up in Uganda not knowing why he was always sick. 

His childhood in the 1990s was a string of recurrent infections: malaria, diarrhea, headaches, and skin rashes. By 14, he was scarily thin, at which point doctors put him on a new medication that seemed to help. It was for kidney disease, his father falsely told him. But a classmate with the same prescription knew better. “Are you also suffering from kidney disease?” Harerimana remembers asking him. “And the boy said, ‘No — I’m suffering from AIDS.’”

In the 1990s, at the height of the AIDS crisis in Uganda, hundreds of thousands of babies like Harerimana were born with HIV each year, contracting the virus from their HIV-positive parents in utero, during childbirth, or while breastfeeding. About half did not live to see their second birthday.  

But those outcomes have changed in radical, often remarkable ways over the past three decades. In some parts of Uganda, as many as one in four infants were once infected with HIV at birth, leading to 32,000 new childhood HIV infections annually in the mid-1990s. Today, that infection rate has plummeted to fewer than 5,000. 

This changed because Uganda — along with much of the world — has diligently perfected the simple interventions needed to keep babies safe from the virus: repeated HIV testing for all expectant parents, and widely available anti-retroviral therapies for those who test positive, which makes the virus virtually untransmittable. In some countries, Botswana among them, new childhood infections are now so exceedingly rare that every new baby born with HIV prompts a comprehensive federal audit.

“I’m filled with hope because now, as Africans, we’re not asking whether elimination is possible,” said Doris Macharia, president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We are actually confronting what it will take to finish this job. That is profound. That is progress. And that’s where we should be.”

But finishing the job would mean building a world where no babies are born with HIV at all, and many African countries with the highest HIV burdens remain far from that goal. About 120,000 children are still newly infected with HIV each year, most of them before or shortly after birth, accounting for nearly 10 percent of all new infections. That’s one child every four and a half minutes. 

Thanks to advancements in treatments, even babies born with HIV today can go on to live long, healthy, happy lives. But it is more difficult, because the same barriers that prevent their parents from getting on treatment while pregnant mean that many of their children struggle to access care. As a result, roughly 75,000 kids die from AIDS-related causes each year, typically before their fourth birthday. That is almost definitely an undercount, as it likely excludes many of the roughly 34 percent of children living with HIV who are never accurately diagnosed. 

Reaching these kids is what Macharia calls the last mile in preventing childhood HIV. It is also the hardest to cross — and particularly so now. Cuts to foreign assistance from the US and other countries have hampered progress, and in some harrowing cases, even reversed it. A projection by UNAIDS found that sustained aid cuts could lead to 1.1 million additional HIV infections in children between 2024 and 2040, and 820,000 more deaths.

Harerimana, who has found his calling as a community health worker, is already seeing some of those dire scenarios play out. For the first time in years, he’s seen an uptick in babies being born with HIV in his town.

“It takes me back to those days,” he said, “when there was no access to medication, where there was no access to research,” there was only “a disease everyone fears, a disease that has no concrete cure.”

Regression is not inevitable. Even the Trump administration — which deeply destabilized global HIV services last year — has supported the rollout of Lenacapavir, a potentially game-changing HIV prevention drug, for expectant parents at risk of HIV. Stopping babies from being born with HIV is, after all, about as sympathetic a case as you can get with foreign aid. But the very aid systems that have helped us reach the cusp of an HIV-free generation are now confronting a massive transition, one that makes all elements of care far more difficult. 

The secret to making sure kids don’t get HIV

After Harerimana learned he had HIV, he began zoning out in class. He couldn’t understand how a kid like him could get a virus he thought spread only through unprotected sex. 

“I would just sit and get lost. My mind would only think about how I’m going to lose my friends, how I’m going to die very soon,” he said. “And I started to ask God, like, ‘God, where did I get this disease?’”

Even many adults at the time didn’t realize there were other ways to contract HIV. Pervasive stigmas around HIV have made correcting such misconceptions an uphill battle around the world. As recently as 2016, only 56 percent of young women in Uganda knew much about vertical transmission, which is how the vast majority of children acquire HIV. Nearly half of babies born to an HIV-positive parent who is not on treatment will contract the virus. In comparison, there is at most a 1 in 72 chance of contracting the virus if you have unprotected sex with an untreated HIV-positive partner, and a 1 in 158 chance if you share needles with them.

But as awful as it sounds, at the height of the HIV epidemic, there “was not a market” for investing in pediatric treatment and prevention, said Florence Riako Anam, co-executive director of the Global Network of People Living with HIV. That was because “most of the children who acquired HIV did not live long. Many of them did not go beyond months, frankly.”

But some, like Harerimana, did live long enough to see a renaissance of new treatments and discoveries. The medication he began as a teen was an anti-retroviral therapy, or ARV, that these days is so effective, it can virtually eliminate HIV from your bloodstream. 

In 1994, a group of American researchers found that people who are pregnant and on treatment have a minuscule chance of passing the virus on to their baby, results so impressive that they halted their medical trial so they could offer treatment to the placebo group. Nearly 80 percent of HIV-positive pregnant people in the US were on ARVs by 1999. By 2003, just 1.2 percent of those parents passed the virus to their children.

But it would take many years for these miracle drugs to reach most African countries. Philippa Musoke, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Uganda, led a landmark study in 1999 that found just two doses of the HIV drug Nevirapine — which cost $2 at the time per dose — slashed the chance a newborn would contract the virus by 50 percent. Other treatments relied on a “cocktail” of drugs that were much more effective, but often prohibitively expensive, costing $815 for a month-long course in the US.  

“It opened people’s eyes that a simple regimen could actually prevent mother-to-child transmission globally,” Musoke told me. Within a few years, many countries began rolling out free Nevirapine programs  — and later, more effective combined drug treatments — for pregnant people living with HIV. 

Most of the world saw its childhood infection rate collapse, but the undisputed breakout star was Botswana, which, in 1999, became the first African country to offer free HIV drugs to all pregnant women. At the time, a woman in the country had a one in four chance of having HIV, among the highest rates in the world. If she had three children in the years that followed, at least one would likely become infected before or during childbirth or breastfeeding. 

But thanks to the free treatment program, and a robust maternal health system that integrates universal HIV testing, a young Botswanan woman living with HIV today has an under 1.2 percent chance of passing the virus to her kids. Last year, the World Health Organization certified Botswana as the first country in the world with a high HIV rate to eliminate mother-to-child transmissions as a public health threat.

Other countries have also managed to pull off remarkable, albeit more modest, progress. In Kenya, where Anam lives, more than three-quarters of pregnant people with HIV received treatment in 2008, up from virtually none in 2003. In those five years, the number of children newly infected with HIV fell by 75 percent. 

After contracting HIV, “I don’t think many of us thought we could have kids,” not safely at least, said Anam, who tested positive for the virus shortly after giving birth to her first child 26 years ago. “And then over time, with advancement in treatment, it became an option for women.” 

Many of her friends who thought they could never have more children, some of whom lost their first babies to HIV in the 1990s, suddenly found they could have kids safely. Their second children, she says, are now in their tweens. 

Botswana cracked the code. Why can’t everyone else?

Even with all that progress, hundreds of babies are still being born with HIV each day. Other than Botswana, no country with a high HIV rate has managed to all but eliminate childhood HIV. Despite decades of progress and far better treatments, the rest of the world is still stubbornly far from that goal. 

“We’ve really made significant progress, but we’re not there yet,” Musoke said. “That is really unacceptable because we have all the knowledge, we have all the resources” to ensure no child is born with HIV in theory.

Yet about one in six pregnant people living with HIV is still not on treatment. And about half of those who are on treatment don’t take it as consistently as they should. Together, their children account for the vast majority of the 328 infected with HIV every single day.

“We can’t just wait for people to go to the clinic. We have to go to them.”

Doris Macharia, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation

Reaching these parents is critical. The problem is that many of them do not know they have the virus and live in rural areas where there are few providers who can test them for it. 

“Eliminating pediatric HIV and mother-to-child transmission is no longer a scientific question,” Macharia said. “It’s really a delivery and a systems question,” which will require more outreach workers, especially peer mentors, people living with HIV who’ve been trained to help others like themselves navigate their treatment and prevention options.

Liako Serobanyane tested positive for HIV in 2007, when she was pregnant with her second child. She trained as a mentor mother through the group Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho because she wanted to help “other women going through what I went through, even though I didn’t get the support I needed at the time,” she said. “There is no other model better than this, because we have been there. We know how it feels to be HIV-positive. We know how it feels to be rejected.”

The progress that’s been made so far against mother-to-child transmission has largely stemmed from parents who were easier to reach. They were already receiving prenatal care or giving birth at a clinic or hospital, as 99.8 percent of expectant parents in Botswana do. But there are still many parents with limited access to care. In Nigeria, which accounts for one in seven of the world’s babies born with HIV, about half of parents give birth at home with no skilled health worker present. The country has offered free HIV treatment to its citizens for nearly two decades now. But not enough pregnant people are taking them up on it. It is mentors like Serobanyane who have the best shot at making sure they do.

“We can’t just wait for people to come to the clinic” anymore, said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “We have to go to them.” 

The US built the system to keep babies HIV-free. It’s now dismantling it.

But bringing together all of those factors – strengthening delivery systems, hiring more peer mentors, normalizing HIV testing, and convincing more parents to give birth at the hospital – is neither easy nor cheap.

Maybe the biggest difference between Botswana and other countries with high HIV rates is that Botswana has diamonds. Lots of diamonds. Enough diamonds to turn Botswana into one of Africa’s richest countries per capita. 

That’s allowed Botswana to largely bankroll its own HIV response. As Alankar Malviya, Botswana country director for UNAIDS, told me, the country pays for about 70 percent of all testing, treatment, and outreach costs. Other less well-off countries like Nigeria have built about 90 percent of their HIV response primarily with the help of PEPFAR, the US-funded HIV program that began in 2003. It’s no coincidence that much of the world’s success in fighting off childhood HIV infections so far began that year. PEPFAR has helped make sure that at least 7.8 million babies were not born with HIV over the past 26 years. 

PEPFAR continues to fund lifesaving HIV treatment around the world, according to newly released data, but the Trump administration has severely disrupted its support for prevention and outreach work. That includes cuts to many outreach programs aimed at preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission, though the administration has maintained funding for some services, such as prenatal testing. 

With less funding for HIV screenings and prevention, fewer pregnant people will know they need antiretrovirals in the first place. They won’t have the condoms they need to prevent the spread. And if their babies contract the virus in utero or while breastfeeding, their parents might not know why they are so sick until it is too late.

“We are in a period of transition,” a senior official from the US State Department, which now oversees PEPFAR, told me under the condition of anonymity. “And during that transition, yes, there may be a few people who used to go to a particular community site that isn’t there anymore, and are having to figure out where to get those services from.”

The official insisted that the US still cares about preventing mother-to-child transmission. The Trump administration has shifted the way aid works by channeling it through bilateral agreements that require countries to partially pay their own way. It throws the old, and in many ways, highly successful system of HIV aid — which relied on international organizations as partners — out the window.

“Yes, it saved lives. Yes, it made progress,” the official said of the old aid order. “But it isn’t a model we can keep going with.”

Josephine Nabukenya, a pediatric HIV advocate who, like Harerimana, was born with the virus in the 1990s, agrees that having countries take more ownership of their health care system is a good thing in the long run. “But you do it in a phased approach,” she said, to avoid letting parents and children fall through the cracks. 

So far, that’s not how it’s played out. Mothers2Mothers, an organization that, since 2001, has trained HIV-positive moms like Serobanyane to be peer health mentors — a uniquely effective intervention — lost most of its funding last year. They closed offices in four countries and laid off hundreds of workers and peer mothers, shutting off outreach services for 450,000 people.

Serobanyane is based in Lesotho, one of the few countries where the group still operates. Because of funding cuts, she is one of just two mentor mothers in her district, down from six. “We love our job. We are doing it passionately,” she said, “but not knowing if the funding is going to be there or is going to be cut off is depressing and tiring.” 

She also worries for the mothers whose treatment or testing she can no longer follow as closely. Reminding them to attend their prenatal screenings or refill their treatment prescriptions requires resources and support that are no longer as available to her. 

Lesotho is one of the over 30 countries that have signed bilateral health aid deals with the State Department so far. The country is set to receive $232 million over 5 years from the US, which its government could theoretically use to hire its own mentor mothers and otherwise make up for lapses in HIV care and outreach. “It’s our dream that the mentor mother model be absorbed by the government one day,” Serobanyane said.

But the reality is, said Mpolokeng Mohloai, director of Mothers2Mothers in Lesotho, “the government is not yet ready to absorb it all.” 

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable.”

In an absolute worst-case scenario, if US-funded HIV programs aren’t adequately replaced, then a total of up to 1.7 million more children could die of AIDS-related causes by 2040, according to UNAIDS, a devastating leap in the wrong direction on an issue where the world had been making so much progress.

Even if governments do manage to plug some gaps, a large number of parents and children will lose access to support in the short term as a result of funding cuts. This means more mothers who don’t know they’re HIV-positive until it’s too late, more parents who fall behind on their medications, and more children who grow up to be very sick.

“Every child that is infected with HIV is unacceptable. Any mom who acquires HIV during pregnancy, breastfeeding, or even before then — that is also unacceptable,” said Macharia of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. “Those have to be unacceptable facts for us.”

Harerimana lost his job as a community health worker last year when the Trump administration put a pause on all foreign assistance funding. He has continued to work without pay, supporting children and their parents, some of whom he says have already missed out on critical treatment.

“I can now comfortably say that over the past year, when the aid cuts and confusion started, we are now seeing children getting infected by HIV through mother-to-child transmission again,” he said. “By the time the system stabilizes, the world will know how much the aid cuts have caused.”