This is a letter from an SSIR reader in response to our most recent cover essay. Do you have a response to an article published in the magazine or online? Add your comment here on SSIR.org, or send us a note at [email protected].

To the Editor:

I was interested to read “Why Don’t Philanthropists Build Anymore” in the Summer 2026 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. I applaud Sarah Cone for raising this important question, but I’d like to offer a different perspective.

I will paraphrase the essay’s thesis as follows: the world would be a better place if today’s billionaires would apply their brilliance to building new civic institutions, as their Gilded Age forebears did.

I respectfully disagree.

First, the Gilded Age robber barons who founded hospitals, libraries, universities, research institutes, museums, and foundations did so at a time when the United States was still shedding its former identity as a largely agrarian society with an inferiority complex. In the 19th century, the advent of railroads, steel, and massive immigration necessitated new institutions to serve and educate a growing population while proving that this upstart nation could compete with Europe in terms of cultural sophistication and scientific acumen. In the 21st century, those institutions are plentiful—more plentiful than the philanthropic dollars they are continuously chasing.

Second, it simply isn’t true that today’s billionaires don’t found institutions. Eli Broad, George Lucas, and Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales all founded new museums housing their own collections. And many of the country’s largest foundations were founded in the last few decades, such as The Gates Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, Good Ventures, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation/Arnold Ventures, and the JPB Foundation.

Third, neither the super-wealthy magnates of old nor those of today have shown much interest in solving the fundamental inequities and shortcomings of society. The essay argues that “the Gilded Age philanthropists … built new structures from the ground up when they identified a gap. Today, the gaps are not hard to find. Many areas of civic life are failing and would benefit from new, purpose built institutions.” These gaps were enumerated elsewhere in the essay: prisoner recidivism, lack of proper psychiatric care, persistent drug addiction, homelessness, public defender shortages, and shortcomings in childcare programs, elementary-school education programs, workforce-training programs, special education programs, etc. I don’t believe the problem is that contemporary billionaires are trying to solve these problems the wrong way. The evidence makes it pretty clear that, with a very few exceptions, they are not trying to solve them in any way. The philanthropic interests of today’s billionaires, when those interests exist at all, tend to focus on diseases that have impacted their own families or their personal or business enthusiasms.

But the statement I’d most like to push back on is this: “the philanthropic class largely writes checks to floundering institutions, offering money where institutional imagination is needed.”

I must object to three assumptions implicit in that statement: 1) the nonprofit organizations that are addressing these important issues are floundering; 2) they are floundering not because they are underfunded, but because they lack “institutional imagination”; and 3) that the world would be a better place if these floundering institutions were replaced by new institutions conceived by today’s tech and finance billionaires.

Let’s address each assumption in turn.

First, by and large, the large nonprofits addressing these issues are not floundering (or foundering)—they are, often, doing extraordinary work with limited resources. Examples abound: Community Solutions (Built for Zero), The Last Mile, FreeWorld, Center for Employment Opportunities, Frontline Justice, Scale Justice, Partners for Justice, Gideon’s Promise, American Journalism Project, Report for America, The Marshall Project, Nurse-Family Partnership, and Fountain House, to name just a few.

Second, it is unfair to imply that these organizations are struggling because they lack imagination. The professionals and volunteers of these organizations work week by week, month by month, year by year, to address the very social ills mentioned in the article, and often do so with inspiring effectiveness and creativity, despite limited funds and the dismissive attitude of too many observers. The fact that the leaders of these organizations have not accumulated the wealth of the billionaires listed in this article is not a result of an absence of ability, but rather a presence of values that guide them to apply their ability to civic concerns rather than the accumulation of private wealth.

Third, I am especially uncomfortable with the suggestion that for-profit billionaires are better suited to found and run mission-driven civic organizations than the nonprofit leaders currently doing so. Counterexamples are numerous:

  • Bill Gates, having built one of history’s greatest technology companies, apparently assumed that the talent that enabled him to triumph in the technology industry would enable him to pioneer innovative solutions to the shortcomings in secondary education. First, he launched a new small-schools initiative, which struggled for a decade before he abandoned it. Then he launched an Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new evaluation methods which did not, as hoped, significantly affect student achievement, graduation rates, or teacher effectiveness or retention.
  • Mark Zuckerberg similarly assumed he could mastermind a transformation of American schools, starting with a test case in Newark, New Jersey. As documented in Dale Russakoff’s book The Prize, this hubristic plan went badly wrong because it prioritized the assumptions of wealthy tech elites and politicians over the actual needs and voices of the Newark community.
  • As mentioned in the essay: Palmer Luckey (Oculus, Anduril Industries), “spent time developing a concept that, had he pursued it, would have been among the most genuinely Carnegian philanthropic acts of the 21st century: a nonprofit private-prison chain designed to be paid only when its former inmates stayed out of prison after release … Luckey ultimately abandoned the project … and went on to build a defense-technology company now valued at tens of billions of dollars.” We are told in the article that he abandoned the project because it would have involved too much lobbying. Such is life on the mission-driven side of the tracks.

Why do billionaires so often fail in these self-styled ventures?

Of course, I don’t know for sure. But I can offer a few educated guesses.

First, because building impactful mission-driven institutions is hard. Not, I assume, harder than building enormously profitable technology companies. But hard in a different way. Michael Jordan was a world-famous athlete, but he couldn’t hit a curve ball as well as countless less-famous baseball players. Different situations call for different skills.

Second, based on what I can see from the metaphorical bleachers, building a massive company means you usually get to focus on the markets, products, services, and processes that will best enable you to reach your goals, and dispense with those that slow you down. Building a civic institution usually means redoubling your efforts when constituencies and circumstances prove especially problematic. Entrepreneurs accustomed to top-down decision-making and the white-knuckle thrill of watching investments turn into robust returns are bound to lose interest when change is slow, and challenges persist.

The bottom line is this: I believe Sarah Cone and I, and most readers of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, will agree that in a world where scarcity is the norm, there is no shortage of at least two things: urgently important civic needs and individuals with overwhelming fortunes. May the latter be inspired to channel their wealth in service of the former. I’d ask only that they learn from and support the brilliant professionals who have already shown what they can do when given the necessary resources.

Read more stories by Matthew Bregman.