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The growing number of billionaires in the U.S. has raised increasing questions about their beliefs and their outsized influence, both on government and on society. Nowhere is the scrutiny so intense as in Silicon Valley, where so many billionaires have spawned over the last 50 years. Having lived in Silicon Valley most of my adult life, with a short sojourn “back East” for graduate school, I have known, taught, observed, and written about many of these entrepreneurs and the culture they have created. We talk about a first generation of successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—men like David Packard and Bill Hewlett, who, with their mentor Fred Terman, can be credited with creating this engine of innovation, influence, and community-mindedness in Santa Clara Valley. They were followed by a second generation—I include Chuck Geschke and John Warnock of Adobe, Jim Morgan of Applied Materials, and John Morgridge of Cisco Systems—who showed the same commitment to community building and exemplary employment practices. They built the social and charitable institutions of Silicon Valley, including American Leadership Forum Silicon Valley, which has trained and linked two generations of leaders in business and other sectors dedicated to community building. But there was change happening during this second generation. A different culture—we can call it a third generation—was emerging alongside the second, a culture forged by entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Andy Grove of Intel, and Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. These men, and a few women, were self-conscious about the Silicon Valley moment—that one had to move fast (and occasionally break things) to lead the technological revolution and build their wealth and influence. They were less engaged in community and the solution of social problems, though not hostile to it. They often assigned community engagement to others in their companies, or let business partners attend to it. Gordon Moore, Andrew Grove’s partner at Intel, became one of the most generous and thoughtful philanthropists of his generation. Steve Jobs’ widow, Laureen Powell Jobs, has become one of the most influential Silicon Valley donors. Some third-generation entrepreneurs did emphasize social and community engagement from the start. Third-generation figures such as Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll of eBay baked in community engagement and bettering the world from the beginning. I served on the board of the Skoll Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship for 17 years, with a mission to apply entrepreneurial zeal and techniques to social change to solve “the world’s most pressing problems.” Nationally, as much larger fortunes accumulated, held by a very small group of individuals, calls increased for the new billionaire class to serve society more actively. Bill Gates of Microsoft, a second-generation figure and resident of “Silicon Forest” (Seattle-Portland), was influenced by his parents and his then-spouse, Melinda French Gates, to redirect a significant portion of his time and wealth to the Gates Foundation and a host of social and health-related causes. The Gates, joined by investor Warren Buffett, launched The Giving Pledge in 2010 to encourage billionaires like themselves to give away at least half of their wealth during their lifetimes or at their death. More than 250 billionaires and their families have since signed the Giving Pledge, some only then beginning their own philanthropic and social change journeys. Meanwhile, a fourth generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs emerged, individuals whose wealth is typically derived from the internet, social media platforms, and, most recently, artificial intelligence. Success and wealth have come faster for this generation, and there are more of them. Whereas the achievement of billionaire status was rare and the subject of significant notice before 2000, it has become almost routine in recent years. More figures in this fourth generation expect to influence government policy and social mores. Elon Musk, purportedly the world’s richest person, is the symbol of the fourth generation. Not only does he oversee three successful companies—Tesla, SpaceX, and now xAI—but he also wields huge influence on government and how it serves the welfare of the poor in the U.S. and around the world. He joyfully took a buzzsaw to the U.S. budget last year through “DOGE,” empowered by his on-again, off-again relationship with Donald Trump. Even though he signed The Giving Pledge many years ago, he has proclaimed that he now has no plans to be philanthropic, because his companies are his contributions to the world. Two other individuals are prominent among the fourth generation of Silicon Valley billionaires who are rejecting any social responsibility to use their wealth for the benefit of others. These individuals, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, have more aggressively offered their ethical beliefs to others. Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and now an active Silicon Valley investor, regards ethics as simply social imitation, resulting from giving in to dominant norms and pressures. He values the nonconformists who challenge accepted moral beliefs by embracing their own moral instincts, not those of others. His ethics are strongly libertarian, and he regards most philanthropy as inefficient, considering efforts to sidestep existing community and social institutions superior moral choices. Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and the venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, strongly believes innovation improves human life and will make all humans better off in the long term. He explicitly advocates weighing the interests of future generations over today’s humans who new technologies may harm. Like Thiel, he believes any government restrictions on technological development are anti-social. Like Musk, he explicitly argues that creating companies and technologies is the most important philanthropy. Nonetheless, he, his wife, and his partners have pledged to donate a large share of their wealth over time. The Giving Pledge, meanwhile, is somewhat in the doldrums (see here). New signups have slowed, and Thiel has characterized the Pledge as an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club.” (Gates has been tainted by his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.) According to Thiel, he told Elon Musk, an early signatory, to unsign because his wealth would end up going “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates.” Signatories select their own charitable recipients, and there are many conservative as well as liberal signatories, according to the Pledge’s defenders. There were 14 new signatories in 2025. How widespread Thiel’s and Andreessen’s views are among the wealthy is hard to determine. Many have opined that we are in another “Gilded Age,” where the fabulously wealthy are the most celebrated and admired, but the least engaged in the community. These billionaires are buying ever more luxurious homes and estates, moving their formal residences to Florida for its favorable tax treatment. And they often tout their superior social, political, and ethical analysis. Will there be a fifth generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, more generous and less narcissistic? I suspect today we are seeing the fruits of what Robert Reich once called “the secession of the successful,” who have retreated into their gated communities, private estates, and private aircraft (see here). It is hard to empathize with the poor when you have so little contact with them—and are busy patting yourself on your back for your own accomplishments. The answer ultimately is for billionaires to be exposed to the real problems of their own communities and the world. We need more strategies to do that. I have always admired Prince (now King) Charles of the U.K., who for several years invited business leaders and wealthy citizens to join him on bus and walking tours of Britain’s neediest areas to sensitize them to the needs of poorer communities. Imagine Donald Trump doing that!
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