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Please Tell Me Nobody is Falling for the Bezos ‘Giving Away His Fortune’ Bullsh*t

How many fake billionaire foundations need to be created before people realize it’s a PR scam mixed with tax avoidance?

Mitchell Peterson
6 min readNov 17, 2022
hello-i-m-nik photo from Unsplash

Once again, the media is pumping out articles about how another billionaire has pledged to give away their money. The craziest part for me is that people still fall for this grift. Remember the Giving Pledge? The ridiculous PR campaign where billionaires signed some bullsh*t promise — with zero commitment or follow-up — to ‘give away’ their money? That was over ten years ago, and what happened?

Gates’ net worth went from $53,000,000,000 to $115,000,000,000 while Mr. Warren Buffett’s went from $39,000,000,000 to $83,000,000,000, and now that dude is ninety years old — Warren! You’re running out of time to ‘give away’ your money, brother.

Somehow, these really really really rich and intelligent people don’t seem to know how to give away their money! They say time and time again they want to donate every last penny, but it just keeps piling up.

It is almost like they’re not giving away their money at all.

Spoiler alert: they aren’t.

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Mitchell Peterson
Mitchell Peterson

Written by Mitchell Peterson

Freelance writer in his tenth year outside the US. Currently in rural Spain writing the Substack bestseller and soon-to-be book, 18 Uncles.

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