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Episode Summary Billionaires in America are changing the landscape of philanthropy. Journalist Teddy Schleifer of Vox’s Recode Daily podcast, joins Michelle to talk about what billionaires are doing with their money, the debate about Donor Advised Funds, and large scale philanthropy. “One thing society might not appreciate is how much those entities [large East Coast Foundations] are going to seem like small potatoes. The amount of money being made in Silicon Valley and is theoretically going to be deployed to the charitable sector...is enormous.”
Episode Notes
Teddy Schleifer is a journalist for Vox’s recode, covering what billionaires in the Silicon Valley are doing with their money.
References:
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Transcript
This is Michelle Shireen Muri. Your host and fellow traveler on the Ethical Rainmaker, a podcast exploring the topics we don't often visit in nonprofits and philanthropy, including the places we can step into our power or step out of the way. During the pandemic so far, hundreds of thousands have lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs. Many people are struggling emotionally, psychologically, socially. Collective grief is big for all of us and we are beginning to live our lives in different ways. Many of us are struggling economically… However, some of us aren’t. During the pandemic so far, the number of billionaires spiked by 30%. Around the time of this podcast recording in Spring 2021, there is a record high of 2,755 billionaires. 86% of those billionaires are richer than they were a year ago. As today’s guest says “It’s easy to lose track of numbers or to say that billionaires continue to be billionaires...but the scale matters if you care about wealth inequality. It's important to keep up. This isn’t like the 20th century” Teddy Schleifer, is a reporter at Vox’s Recode, and hosts the podcast, Recode Daily. He’s a journalist who has spent the last six years writing about billionaires and the mega-rich in America and more recently, he’s moved to the true home of the modern billionaire - the San Francisco Bay Area - to get an up close look at the tech fortunes being made and deployed during this extraordinary era of American capitalism. Prior to explicitly covering Money and Influence as a Senior Reporter for Recode, Teddy was a Political Reporter for CNN, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York times. I became familiar with some of Teddy’s work, after attending a few conversations he’s hosted, including conversations about whether it is ethical to BE a Billionaire, and a conversation with a few billionaires, about ethics around Donor Advised Funds. I asked Teddy to join me today because I wanted to talk about all this, and I was struck by this portion of his bio: “just as reporters cover poverty in America, reporters must also cover and uncover wealth in America - offering the scrutiny that informs essential debates about income inequality, money in politics, and the role of private philanthropy. If we don’t have a common set of facts about how the wealthiest people in society spend their money or live their lives, then we are just shooting in the dark - arguing based on press releases, unfounded suspicions and our set-in-stone prior beliefs.” I am so honored, to welcome Teddy Schleifer to The Ethical Rainmaker! Thank you for joining us today! Teddy Schleifer: Sure. Thanks for having me. Michelle Shireen Muri: Of course. Teddy, you have this wealth of knowledge, we could ask you a million questions that would be absolutely critical for us to understand the answers to both the nonprofits and philanthropy. But I think because so many of our listeners are really rooted in the details of their day to day work at their nonprofits and coming up for air and for news in other parts of the world sometimes, but not always able to, I don't think we're actually doing an amazing job tracking billionaires and what they're up to, and in our sector as well. I guess my first question for you would be, you've been covering billionaires, what are billionaires doing with their money right now? Teddy Schleifer: That's a great, great question, and it's harder to answer than you'd think. I think the boring answer, which is often, I think is revealing, but often is unsatisfying, is that billionaires are ... I think the line between a billionaire and an asset manager has gotten very, very thin. What I mean by that is that most billionaires are actually doing pretty boring things with their money. If you have $50 billion, or even $1 billion, you know what your life is like, is you have a wealth manager, or if you have enough money, you have a family office, and you invest the money in assets, and you try to balance risk. Maybe some money will be in stock, some in bonds, some in foreign currencies, some in real estate. Basically, it's called wealth preservation, is sort of a euphemism that's common in the wealth management industry. What that means is the money is meant to grow, or at least not get smaller, and that's sort of how things go. I think what gets written about often, it often can paint a skewed portrait of what most people are doing with at least the volume of their money, which for every person who's buying a Hawaiian Island or buying a sports team or donating billions of dollars to charity, that's actually a small sliver of the wealth that we're talking about here. Most of the money is being invested and is meant to not depreciate. The other complication here obviously is that, and this will upset some kind of critics on the left of wealth inequality, is that lots of these money is an unrealized gains. Right? What that means is there's obviously a lot of frustration from activists about someone like Jeff Bezos, right? Why does Jeff Bezos have $200 billion? Does Jeff Bezos really have $200 billion? Well, it sort of depends how you think about it. He certainly could have $200 billion if tomorrow he decided to sell all of his Amazon stock and realize it, and he'd have to pay a capital gains tax and yada, yada, yada. But I guess defenders of billionaire wealth gains would say, well, he's the CEO of Amazon for a whole host of reasons that have to do with the stock market of public and public company leadership, CEOs don't want to sell stock because it may send a bad signal to the market. Jeff Bezos technically has $200 billion, but doesn't really. That's the other sort of complication here, is that, what do billionaires do with their money? Lots of times it just sort of sits there. Michelle Shireen Muri: Got it. Lots of times it just sits there, and I'm hearing that most of the time people are just trying to make more money. They're just trying to hoard their wealth or keep it growing. Teddy Schleifer: Yeah. I mean, I think they would say, well, what do you expect us to do? Should we actively try and lose money? Should we go hide it under a mattress? I mean, I think one of the realities of, I guess this is true of all ... It's true, whether or not you put $5 under a pillow as a kid from the tooth fairy, or if you have $50 billion, is that money compounds, right? I think if you have a large amount of money and you invest it responsibly in various sectors, it's going to grow. If you are starting from a large base, it's going to grow a lot. It's different than the $5 under your pillow from the tooth fairy, but essentially the amount of money you have, if you have $50 billion, could very easily become $55 or $60 billion in a single year. I think, either is just one stat that fascinates me that I think speaks to this, which is there's been a lot of adoration of McKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos for remaking philanthropy. She gave away $6 billion in 2020, which is believed to be the largest amount of money that ...it's the largest amount of money that a living billionaire, so someone who's not alive, not in their will, has given away directly to nonprofits in a single year. No living person has ever given away more money directly to charities in a year like MacKenzie Scott in 2020. And yet MacKenzie Scott actually got wealthier in 2020. Even though she sets records, and she's spoken about her desire to "empty the safe." That meaning that she wants to get rid of all of her money, and yet she's going in the opposite direction. I think that speaks to the point about when you have a lot of money, it just gets bigger unless you actively try to stop it or actively try to screw up, and that's because McKenzie Scott owns somewhere like three or four percent of Amazon, and Amazon stock is way up. Even though she's trying to empty the safe, the safe gets heavier because Amazon's doing well. Michelle Shireen Muri: You talk about how we should all be paying attention to wealth inequality. I'm wondering what some of the most interesting or most riveting points are that you think that we should be paying attention to in the nonprofit and philanthropy space. What are some of the big things that are like, raise the alarm, sound, the alarm, or red flags, or what should we be watching and tracking? Teddy Schleifer: As a journalist, what I really think a lot about when we think about inequality is just how little information we truly have about what the wealthiest people in society are doing with their money. I think actually the problem is getting worse. One thing I think a lot about in my sort of meta reflections on my beat is a lot of billionaires feel targeted. Over the last couple of years, obviously there've been a rise of more left-wing politicians who call out billionaires by name. Even the word billionaire, I've noticed, has become this like charged thing, where it's like some people use it as an insult or as a pejorative, even though maybe it's just like an objective fact that like calling someone has green eyes. I think one of the unfortunate reactions to this feeling of persecution, whether it's legitimate or not, it doesn't really matter. I think one of the consequences of it, or what's more interesting to me are the consequences of it, which is that lots of people just don't want to talk about this stuff at all. I find that, in my own reporting, I don't get much access to kind of billionaires to talk about being a billionaire. I think that actually is unfortunate if you care about inequality. I think that the wealthiest people in the world should talk about, what do they feel the responsibilities are? What's it like sort of being a "target?" How do they wrestle with various demands on their time? We were talking earlier about Jeff Bezos having $200 billion, or does he not, or does he really? I would love to hear Jeff Bezos, what does he think about that? I think one of the challenges is that, as there's more and more attention paid to inequality, which there obviously has been over the last five years and really over the last decade or two, I personally would love to hear more billionaires wrecking with that inequality. I think, because the temperature has gotten turned up, like not illegitimately and not without reason, I mean, it has gotten turned up, I think they've clammed up in a way that has made candid conversations about this stuff harder. That really bothers me. It's not because I'm on some crusade to cure income inequality. I'm aware of my limitations as a journalist, but I just believe in transparency and I believe that a lot of these people should be talking about these things because it's good for democracy. I'll leave it to the Elizabeth Warrens of the world, or policymakers, or people who are listening to this podcast. I'll let them focus on solving the problem, but I just want to elucidate the problem, and that's hard when these people don't want to talk about it, by and large. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. But you have been able to have some really interesting conversations. Like I said, I first learned about you attending a conversation you were hosting about donor advised funds, and you actually had folks on that panel able to talk about their own wealth. Can you tell us a little more about that moment, that panel that you hosted and what you're seeing around, for example, donor advised funds? Donor Advised Funds Teddy Schleifer: Sure. Donor advised funds, as folks may know, or if they don't, are a huge thing in philanthropy that are sort of in the weeds, but essentially they're middlemen, mid between a donor and a charity. How it works is a wealthy person will give, for various tax reasons, they might want to give a hundred million dollars, or even you can open up a donor advised fund for a small amount of money. You can want to give $5,000, and they essentially serve as a place to give them money now, to set it aside for charity, and the money then goes to charity later. It could be much later. Some critics would say it could be never, but they become very controversial in the nonprofit world, especially over the last year during the pandemic when lots of nonprofits are struggling because they can become just another financial instrument while you [inaudible 00:13:48] wait for you to get a tax cut without necessarily giving the money to charity anytime soon. There's about $140 billion that sits in donor advised funds right now. Again, that can be just me and you, but it could also be someone like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or whomever, or Mackenzie Scott, frankly, who uses donor advice funds as well. They become controversial during COVID because you see nonprofits struggling, and you wonder, wait a minute, what about the $140 billion that you're supposed to give to charity? What happened to that? Michelle Shireen Muri: That's right. Teddy Schleifer: I think that's an industry that obviously there's been more and more calls for more regulation of it. Largely, it's based on laws passed a half century ago. I think DAFs got started, or the legal framework, I think that started, I think, in this late '60s, early '70s, but they've exploded in popularity over the last decade, especially in Silicon Valley where I'm based. They've become very in vogue for Silicon Valley philanthropists. There's a lot of criticism that's made that these are things that should be regulated much more aggressively. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. Thank you. That's right. We're, I think, attempting to have a reckoning soon, hopefully in the non-profit space. I know that for some of the efforts I'm involved in like community-centric fundraising, it's a hot topic. Should DAFs even be a legitimate financial tool when there is no deadline? There are no restrictions really around how that money gets used, spent, that power can stay in a family for generations if folks wish. Also, of course, there's the perennial conversation of investment versus divestment. Just as a reminder to folks, when a philanthropist, for example, Teddy, or I could start a DAF and MacKenzie Bezos has a DAF. When you invest that money, it's usually at a foundation, you park it at a foundation, not always, but often, and that foundation or that financial institution is investing that money and continuing to receive benefits from investing that money. Again, a lot of the investments that we make, even our philanthropic institutions are still invested in extractive economies. That's another note for the listener. There's even more there around donor advised funds than just the spending out of it. But Teddy, you interviewed a panel of folks and you asked them some really interesting questions about their own opinions of DAFs, and these were people who had a significant amount of money, each of them had a DAF and they had different ethical standings. Can you kind of cover, what is the variety of opinion that you see around DAFs when it comes to folks who are holding them and receiving these criticisms and kind of what are some of the themes that you're seeing or hearing? Teddy Schleifer: A lot of folks who have DAFs ... Let me put it this way. I feel like the two sides are basically talking past each other with like no common set of facts. It's ships passing in the night here. Michelle Shireen Muri: Great. Hook us up with some facts. Teddy Schleifer: Part of the challenge is that there's very limited legal disclosure on this stuff. DAFs do not have to disclose how much individual accounts give to charity in a particular year. They only have to disclose some aggregate information. I think what the debate essentially boils down to, and this is what we're talking about in the conversation I hosted, is DAF critics allege that there are really wealthy people who have billions of dollars in tax subsidized financial accounts that are never giving this money to charity, that they just are totally violating the spirit of the law by raking in the tax breaks, hoarding their money in a DAF and going on with their lives of luxury. That's the criticism that is made. Now, that is definitely theoretically possible. I think, even the proponents of DAFs would say that it's possible. At the end of your life, I think there might be some debate about what, how possible that is, but theoretically, you could put the money in a DAF and then spend it in 60 years. Now, DAF proponents are people who think the DAFs are a great part of the ecosystem, say like this is just a theoretical concept, that there's no evidence this is really happening at scale. You're just sort of using a scare tactic, like, oh, of course this could happen, but is anybody actually really doing that? Because DAFs don't have to disclose that information to regulators or to journalists, no one really knows. So, people can exist in their own reality where the DAF critics can say, this is all sham, and then all the proponents can say, you have no proof. They're both sort of right, because no one really has any facts whatsoever. I reported, one story that I'm kind of proud of from my years covering donor advice funds revolves around Larry Page, who is one of the founders of Google. He's worth, depending on the day, somewhere between $80 and $100 billion, one of the wealthiest people in the world. I think one area of regulation that we're going to see come up over the next couple of years has to do with how charitable foundations use DAFs. Now, charitable foundations, like a private foundation, are required to give away 5% of their money every year to either nonprofits or an operating expenses. DAFs do not have that requirement. One thing that I discovered through my reporting late in 2019 is that Larry Page, who again, is not an inconsequential figure in the world of philanthropy, his charitable foundation- Michelle Shireen Muri: Hey, what are you saying? Teddy Schleifer: Yeah, I know... He's an important person. Larry Page, every year, basically, uses his charitable foundation to make a contribution to a DAF. That's the only thing largely that the foundation does every single year. To meet the 5% threshold, what Page has done in the last three or four years, at least, is around December when the deadline is coming up. He's got to give away 5% of the money. He'll give away pretty close to about exactly 5% of the money from the Larry Page foundation to a DAF, and that doesn't violate the law, but critics would say, well, where does the money go once it's in the DAF? Is it actually going to charities? Why does it happen every December? Why is it exactly 5%? Michelle Shireen Muri: That’s right. Teddy Schleifer: I think that's another example of these things that are theoretically possible do happen sometimes. It's a question about, is it worth regulating the theoretically possible, and what would be the unintended consequences of that? Because proponents of donor advised funds say, if you set a threshold for 5% for donor advised funds, it will become a ceiling rather than a floor, and that someone who currently gives away 20% of the money each year to nonprofits, if they only give away 5%, they'll give away 5% and they won't do more. That's one of the main responses to the criticism. Michelle Shireen Muri: I mean, on the one hand, we see that in philanthropy and foundations, the minimum is giving away 5%, and we actually didn't see ... We saw a handful of foundations, for the first time in 2020, step up and give away more than 5%. Some of our foundations have been pushing and pushing and pushing, usually pushing their boards, which usually have family representation of the family wealth that's kept within that foundation, have been pushing to do maybe 8%, maybe 10, those who are doing 10 or 12 are so proud of themselves. But of course, they're making far more in the investments than they're making with that money. So, it's not like they're losing much or making much of a sacrifice. Right? Teddy Schleifer: There's always this, this belief in the foundation world, or sometimes you see foundations have this knee-jerk reaction to the criticism. Well, like, oh, but if we give away 5% this year, that means all of our money gone within 20 years, which ye. But that implies if you made $0 in additional money over that 20 year period, which ... You'd be making some pretty terrible financial decisions. You'd have other issues if that was the ... You should probably fire your chief financial officer at that point. Michelle Shireen Muri: That's right. Teddy Schleifer: Certainly there's been a debate over what an appropriate amount of payout should be. 5% to some people is too low. Certainly, in a pandemic, there's been lots of foundations that have tried to do more innovative things. I haven't covered this closely, but obviously a bunch of the East Coast foundations, have looked into things like loans to kind of pay more money out or bonds and other kind of billionaire philanthropists have done much more than 5%. But they don't feel constricted by the 5% floor. They don't see it as a ceiling, they see it as a floor, so they're trying to do more. Michelle Shireen Muri: I'm hoping soon to be able to interview somebody that's sunsetting a foundation, because we have examples, like the Chorus Foundation, who, before the pandemic, had decided that they were going to spend down everything and close their doors on a specific timeline and I think that concept is really interesting as well. Especially when we're thinking about a rainy day. Why are we saving for a rainy day? Now that we have funds for a rainy day, when is that rainy day? What is considered rain, right? And I think that's a very relevant question now in this moment where the pandemic continues and we've really been having many reckonings over the last year. When is it an emergency? When are we in a state of emergency? When is the right time to give more? Teddy Schleifer: Yeah. I mean, sunsetting is hard. I mean, as we're talking about with MacKenzie Scott, she wants to sunset effectively, she wants to empty out the safe, but look, this is, to some extent, beyond our control. Because if you're a billionaire or you're a private foundation, your money is not sitting under the mattress. It's invested in the stock market, and the stock market has gone on a tear over the last year or five years, really. Sunsetting gets harder. I mean, if the market tanked, sunsetting would be very easy because you could just put the money on number 26 and roll the roulette wheel, and you'd probably lose all your money. There you go. You've successfully sunsetted by pulling all your money at the roulette table. Michelle Shireen Muri: Teddy Schleifer: Yeah. It's difficult because I think this sort of is the, in the word donor advised fund, this really circles around the word revised, which is how much culpability should the sponsor have for money given by a DAF holder. It's complicated. I've seen this play out a couple of times. I haven't covered it closely, but if you're a DAF sponsor and one of your donors wants to give money to a nonprofit, don't they have the right to do that? Even if you disagree with it, I mean, it's not your money. It's the donor's money. That sort of, again, raises the question to, well, if you're advising the donor, do you share any responsibility for where the money goes or is it totally their call? It's a hard question. Michelle Shireen Muri: Just rewinding a little bit back to the first set of questions around what billionaires are doing with their money. You've seen a lot of terrible practices. You've seen a lot of applaudable practices and you've seen most billionaires just sitting there acquiring more money and doing something that you considered to be quite boring with their money. What is it that you think billionaires should be doing with their money? Teddy Schleifer: I think one thing that is actually rare for billionaire philanthropists to know is this exact ... Let me rephrase that question answer. Michelle Shireen Muri: Go ahead. Yeah. Teddy Schleifer: I think one of the challenges for billionaire philanthropists is that lots of them have no idea how to answer the question you just posed. Especially in Silicon Valley where I cover tech wealth, specifically, lots of these people are very young and acquire enormous amounts of money at a super young age and have no idea what to do with it. It almost, in a weird way, not to play a violin for them, but it almost becomes a burden to have so much money. You've seen someone like Elon Musk, who is the second wealthiest person in the world, and he's not that young at this point, but Musk even tweeted in sometime in the last couple of months, like, if anybody has any ideas of what to do with this much money, like, please let me know on Twitter or something. Michelle Shireen Muri: Yes, he did. I saw that. Teddy Schleifer: I think that is a real challenge. Again, not to offer them too much pity, but lots of philanthropists feel like they do not know what to do with the money at a young age. They delay it. It's interesting sort of seeing the gender components here, it's very often that like, lots of the people in the tech industry that make large amounts of money are men, and then they'll have their wives deal with the philanthropy, which obviously raises a whole bunch of interesting ethical questions. But lots of these- Michelle Shireen Muri: Yeah, and questions about patriarchy. Teddy Schleifer: Absolutely. Lots of young tech philanthropists sort of just delay the decision, right? They figure it out later. I think it's very rare in the industry to see people who have a clear point of view on what they want to do with it and then actively work on it. I'm very interested and I've written a lot or a bit about sort of the effective altruist movement, which obviously, basically this is this belief in philanthropy and I guess a little bit more broadly in life, that money should be used to achieve the greatest good, to reduce the most suffering. It's very heavy on data and analytics that you should measure the return on each dollar. There were a lot of people in Silicon Valley who, with kind of their data obsession, have gravitated toward that. I think that that is obviously a movement that has its flaws, especially on issues around race and things that you can't really measure, but at least is like an orientation and is a point of view. I guess I sort of respect people who know what they want to do with it and are working on it. You see someone like, I think something Dustin Moskovitz, one of the founders of Facebook whose net worth is somewhere around $20 billion, and is probably the most prominent billionaire philanthropist in effective altruism, and he's in his thirties, but he has a clear point of view on what he wants to do with the money and is working on it. I suppose I respect, to your question, about what should billionaires do with their money? I think the question is like working on it and coming up with a strategy and then executing on it. I know that's a good, very basic, simple answer, but it's actually a pretty uncommon to see people doing it. Lots of times they'll just delay it to the future, or as I mentioned, hand it off to a significant other or a parent, or even a child, and then they just don't really think about it until decades down the line. I think the problems with delaying have been well-documented. There's someone actually in Seattle, Stephanie Ellis-Smith, who's another philanthropy consultant I talk to sometimes, who's called this analysis paralysis, which is like, you just don't really know what to do with it so you do nothing. That leads to phenomenons, like we're just talking about with donor advised funds or with foundations, where there's like huge amounts of money that could do a lot of real good in the world for real people that doesn't get used at all because they just can't figure out what to do, so they just do nothing. Michelle Shireen Muri: Right. Thank you. Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I listened to an interview that you did with Sam Bankman-Fried, who was a young cryptocurrency zealot who made millions of dollars. He now has a net worth of 10 Billion, and you were talking to him about being one of the major influencers financially in the Biden campaign, and what that felt like. That was just such an interesting interview to kind of hear one of the voices of quite a young person talking about his own surprise at how he could influence in the way that he did, and also he talks about how little folks are giving away, other billionaires are giving away. Teddy Schleifer: Yeah, he's another effective altruist, someone who is 28 years old and has the same sort of data orientation that lots of people do. There's this going to be this huge, I think the interview with Sam is interesting just for taking a step back here. I mean, there's a lot of focus paid on the big East Coast foundations entities, the Ford Foundation or Carnegie or MacArthur or Rockefeller. I think one thing that listeners might not appreciate, or I guess the society might not appreciate, is how much I think that those entities are going to seem like small potatoes in like 20 or 30 or 40 years. The amount of money that's being made in Silicon Valley, and it's theoretically, if, at least, if you listened to these people's words, it's going to be deployed into the charitable sector is enormous. But Ford Foundations has, which obviously has been around for forever and is seen as a leading light in philanthropy. Has an endowment, I think around $15 billion. I mean, even take someone like Larry Ellison, who is one of the richest people in the world has been sort of AWOL from the world of big philanthropy for a long time, but has talked a big game about spending all of his money on charity. His has net worth of like $80 billion. So, he could have an $80 billion charitable foundation and he receives no scrutiny whatsoever. Meanwhile, there's thousands of articles written about the Ford Foundation. I think the wealth transfer that's going to happen over the next few decades is going to really recenter the conversation around San Francisco and Silicon Valley in a way that I think the East Coast foundations are going to become less of the top dog. Michelle Shireen Muri: Yeah. No, I, and listening to some of the other interviews you've done and reading some of your other work, especially one particular interview with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, just talking about how business is so different now. I was really struck by that realization, too, just listening to how business is changing and how many more billionaires we're about to have and what the landscape is going to look like. That being said, I'm wondering another kind of bigger existential question, which is, is it ethical to have billionaires? Is it ethical to be a billionaire? Teddy Schleifer: I've been writing about this question a lot recently. We just kind of published a couple of big stories pegged to the end or the anniversary of COVID about, what does it mean for society to have these many billionaires? I mean, as you mentioned, I think at the beginning, there's been a 30% increase in billionaires in the world over the last year. Seven or eight of those billionaires have gotten wealthier. I think it raises, I mean, this is an obvious point, but it raises profound questions about the future of capitalism. I think, one of the things that I was most excited about in our recent story was we did a bunch of polling on this question about, is it ethical to have billionaires? How do you feel about this? We polled Americans. We did it in concert with a polling agency called Data For Progress. What we found was interesting. I mean, it's not, as things often are ... I'll try that again. As things often are, the debate was in this gray area. It was not all billionaires were evil and it was not let's have unrestrained capitalism. What we found was lots of Americans do not agree with the sort of furthest left claim that comes from like AOC or Bernie Sanders that billionaires are ... There's a popular quote in the laugh, that every billionaire is a policy failure. The idea that, if there's a billionaire or something went wrong, lots of Americans don't agree with that. They do not believe that a society is fundamentally immoral. If it produces billionaires, they think having billionaires is okay. Your question about, is it ethical to have billionaires? I, myself, don't really, as a reporter recovering this stuff, don't really take an opinion on that, but I think it's interesting to me that lots of Americans do think that billionaires are okay. That being said, lots of them find sort of the scale of billionairedom to be sort of gross, right? This idea that there are so many billionaires, they've all gone so much wealthier. One of the big questions that we asked was, do you think that it's fair that billionaires got wealthier during the pandemic? I think like 70% of people said, no. We asked them, do you think that billionaires are good role models? Similar figures, I don't have it exactly in front of me. Somewhere around 70% I believe said they do not believe they are good role models. Teddy Schleifer: There's sort of is this ... We asked them, obviously one of the things that's been well-documented over the last year or two in polling is a wealth tax, the idea that billionaire's unrealized gains should be taxed, polls super well across partisan blinds too, Democrats, Republicans. I think that where the polling sort of nets out, at least the polling that we did at this moment in time, probably some sort of, I guess what critics would say, some sort of like neo-liberal equilibrium, where they don't agree with the furthest left voices that billionaire should not exist, but they also think the taxes should be higher. They also find lots of their philanthropy to be insufficient, and they believe that billionaires, the capitalism should be restrained, which probably is where, like someone like Joe Biden will probably end up on these questions. It's been interesting listening to his rhetoric on this. Joe Biden said that he does not believe that I forget the exact quote. He said something during the campaign, or maybe right before the 2020 campaign, he said something like, I don't believe that the problem with America is 500 billionaires, and that rich people are just as patriotic as poor people, and obviously lots of big donors supported his campaign, which is obviously different than what someone like Bernie Sanders would say. Then again, Joe Biden is also expected to, in the coming months, call for higher taxes on billionaires. I think the polling does reflect where at least the democratic party is probably going to end up on these questions, which is not castigating the wealthy, not going after them personally, not saying that they're evil people, but calling for higher taxes. One of the most interesting tensions, I think, over the next five years is going to be between the people on the furthest left who see every billionaire as a policy failure, as they say, and the more moderate voices who think that they're just as patriotic and they're not the problem with society. It's going to be an intense debate and I think it's going to speak to a lot about how progressives feel about inequality. One of the questions that came up from our fan base was us asking you like, how can we get ahold of that money? How can community-based organizations get ahold of that money? Or what can small organizations or individual citizens do to influence America's wealthiest? I think it's basically impossible for ordinary people to find out how to get ahold of this. I mean, I think the billionaire philanthropy world is opaque by design. It's not like an accident that people struggle to get money or that journalists struggle to get access. That's sort of the whole point of this stuff. I think you see it often on websites for big foundations where they might say things like we don't accept unsolicited submissions, or some of these people don't even have a website. Michelle Shireen Muri: Yes, all the time. Teddy Schleifer: Which I find like they'll have billions of dollars in assets and zero public profile. One one thing I've written about is Jack Dorsey's new charitable effort called Start Small, which was a billion dollars that he set aside for charity. One of the big criticisms of the Dorsey effort, at least initially was a lot of the money was going to celebrities, was going to ... Dorsey is tight with people in Hollywood and in entertainment. The money was going to foundations affiliated with like Rihanna or Eminem, or Jay-Z, and it's like, okay. I talked with some nonprofit heads who see this big announcement of a billion dollars from Jack Dorsey and were like trying to get ahold of Jack Dorsey. He's doing this whole Google spreadsheet and it's so transparent, but it's transparent on the distribution side. It's not transparent on how to get ahold of him, at least it wasn't initially. If you're a regular guy or girl running a nonprofit and you're not Jay-Z, what am I supposed to do? Again, it's not the fault of any nonprofit head or philanthropists or fundraiser. They could make it more accessible if they wanted to, and they're not on purpose. That's my general point of view. Michelle Shireen Muri: That's right. Thank you for that. Yes, it is opaque for a reason, so as Teddy, and I think that's right. Michelle Shireen Muri: Is there anything that small organizations or individuals can do to influence what's happening with this money and/or what do you think we should be doing as good as citizens and as good nonprofit stores that want to help our communities. It's hard because the power dynamics fundamentally are aligned against the non-profits. Unless you're running a nonprofit that every philanthropist wants to get involved with for various reasons, maybe something like Feeding America or the red cross, some of the mega charities that have sort of this brand appeal. I know this is sort of a pessimistic note, but I don't really think there's much you can do. Because the power dynamics are that the nonprofit is the one seeking, the kind of the manna from heaven, and the philanthropists are often the deities who aren't awarding it. I don't really know if there's anything you can really do. Teddy Schleifer: It's just like a fact of the way the sector is set up, that there is sort of the recipient and the giver, and unless the giver really needs the recipient for some PR reason or something else, you're sort out of luck. I know that's not what people probably want to hear, but...reality. Michelle Shireen Muri: That's okay. That's all right. Teddy Schleifer: Yeah. I mean, look, you should...I think one of the reasons why we need more philanthropy journalists is to peek behind the curtain on this stuff. I'm not obviously a fundraiser myself, but if you believe that there should be more transparency in this world and it shouldn't be this incredible labor to figure out who runs this foundation, like basic stuff like that, or is this- Michelle Shireen Muri: That's right, where the money came from. Teddy Schleifer: Is this an LLC or a DAF or a found ... These are like basic stuff that I know nonprofits struggle with and reporters struggle with. I mean, if you believe that there should be more information about this stuff, then I guess you should support journalists who, and if you are listening to this and you have tips about things I should look into, that is extremely helpful. If you ever hear about something that's happening at a foundation that doesn't feel right, or a weird experience you have with a philanthropist, or frankly, things that are going really well that you think more people should know about, you should get in touch with me, and I am very available on Twitter and I can keep folks anonymous, and I deal with sensitive stuff all the time. I, in general, would love more points in the right direction. Michelle Shireen Muri: Thank you so much for the work that you're doing, and yeah, and for everything that you're doing, I'm sure we will get some tips over time to you. Teddy Schleifer: Sounds good. Thanks so much. Michelle Shireen Muri: And that’s it for The Ethical Rainmaker. I’m your host Michelle Shireen Muri. You can find show notes and transcripts of this and every episode, at THE ETHICAL RAINMAKER.COM We are self-funded. So. If you’d like to inspire this beautiful series through your financial contribution - we’ll take it on Patreon! We now have 33 Patrons including our newest homies, Ashley, Andrea, Natalie, Claire, Jonathan and Rus! Thanks y’all! Please do pass on the word about this pod to people you think might love it - your coworkers, your friends and collaborators...it helps us get the word out! Subscribe to this podcast to get the best of what we have to offer.I promise there are more incredible episodes on their way - every other Wednesday. The Ethical Rainmaker is produced in Seattle, Washington by Kasmira Hall, and Isaac Kaplan-Woolner, and socials by Rachelle Pierce. I am your executive producer and this pod is sponsored by Freedom Conspiracy, my fundraising consulting collective, which you can find at freedom-conspiracy.com. Our awesome theme song “I’m Gold” is by Trick Candles. You can find them on Band Camp. We are so looking forward to continuing these amazing conversations so, see you in two weeks! Comments are closed.
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