Part IThe Story
The Front Page Nobody Expected
On January 23, 1997, readers of The New York Times opened the paper to a story about a man most of them had never heard of. Over fifteen years, the report said, a businessman from New Jersey had given away more than $600 million to universities, hospitals and charities, and had done it so quietly that most of the recipients had no idea who he was. Business magazines had for years estimated his net worth in the billions. In fact he had already handed nearly all of it to two foundations registered in Bermuda, and kept less than $5 million for himself.
The man was Charles F. Feeney, then sixty-five, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the chain of airport and downtown stores that had grown rich selling cognac, perfume and handbags to Japanese tourists. He agreed to talk to the paper only because he had no choice. The duty-free business had just been sold, a partner was suing to stop the deal, and the court papers were about to reveal what he had spent more than a decade hiding. Even then he would not pose for a photograph. The only picture the Times could find of him was seventeen years old.
That morning, beneficiaries who had signed away their right to say where their money came from received faxes from his lawyer's office. The New York consulting firm that had supposedly represented a group of anonymous donors had been a fiction. There was one donor, and his name was Chuck Feeney.
The disclosure turned Feeney from an invisible man into a reluctant model. Over the following two decades he would complete what no one of his wealth had attempted: he gave away the whole fortune, more than $8 billion, while he was still alive to watch it work, and then signed the papers that shut his foundation down. His life is the most complete test anyone has run of an old idea, that wealth is a tool to be spent rather than a monument to be kept.
By the Numbers
Giving While Living
$8B+Grants made by The Atlantic Philanthropies between 1982 and its closure in 2020
1984Year Feeney irrevocably transferred his DFS stake to his foundation
~$2MWhat he estimated he had kept for his and his wife's retirement (Forbes, 2012)
~$1BTotal given to Cornell University, his alma mater
$350MGrant for the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, Atlantic's largest
~2,500Grantees funded across the United States, Ireland, Vietnam, South Africa, Australia, Bermuda and Cuba
Elizabeth, New Jersey
Charles Francis Feeney was born on April 23, 1931, in a working-class neighbourhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey, the second of three children in an Irish American family. The Depression was at its deepest. His father, Leo, was an insurance underwriter who went to Mass every day. His mother, Madaline, was a nurse. His father's mother had come from County Fermanagh, on what would become the border between the two Irelands, a thread of ancestry that would later pull a great deal of money across the Atlantic.
The Feeneys were known in the neighbourhood as people who helped. Feeney later told his biographer, the Irish journalist Conor O'Clery, about his mother's habit of driving past a disabled neighbour each morning as he walked to the bus stop, apparently by chance, so that she could offer him a lift. The kindness was built to look accidental, so that the man receiving it would not feel he owed anything. Decades later her son would design an entire foundation on the same principle.
He was also, from early on, a hustler. As a boy he shovelled snow and sold Christmas cards door to door. None of this was unusual for a child of the Depression, but it established a pattern that never left him: an instinct for small, practical opportunities and an indifference to how they looked.
In 1949, at eighteen, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. The Korean War broke out the following year, and Feeney spent a four-year stint in occupied Japan as a radio operator for Air Force intelligence. The posting mattered more than anyone could have guessed. It gave him a working familiarity with Japan and the Japanese at a time when very few Americans had either, and it qualified him for the GI Bill.
The Sandwich Man
The GI Bill paid for Feeney to study at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, New York. He was the first member of his family to go to university. Money was short, so he sold sandwiches to students in the fraternity houses at night, and became known around campus as the sandwich man. The product was minimal, bologna on two slices of bread, and the margins depended on volume.
Cornell gave him three things he would keep for life. The first was a trade: the hotel school taught the mechanics of hospitality, purchasing and retail, which turned out to be exactly the skills needed to run a chain of shops in airports. The second was a network. Among his classmates was Robert Warren Miller, a fellow hotel student who would become his business partner for nearly forty years. The third was a loyalty that became the backbone of his philanthropy. Cornell received Atlantic's first grant in 1982 and its last in 2016, and close to $1 billion in between.
Feeney graduated in 1956 and went to Europe with little money and no fixed plan. In France he met Danielle Morali-Daninos, the daughter of a Parisian psychiatrist, and they married in 1959. They would have five children.
Selling to the Sixth Fleet
Feeney's first business was built on a quirk of American customs law. In the 1950s, American tourists and servicemen could bring home a limited quantity of liquor free of duty, and they did not have to carry it through customs themselves. They could declare it abroad and have it shipped. Tens of thousands of American sailors and soldiers were stationed in Europe and Asia, and each of them carried a personal duty-free allowance that most never used.
By 1957 Feeney was working as a salesman for a British company called Associated Merchants, selling tax-free liquor to personnel of the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. In September of that year Bob Miller, who had sailed to Spain and taken a job on the reception desk of the Ritz in Barcelona, ran into his old classmate there. Feeney was waiting for Navy ships to arrive. The two men went to dinner and talked about going into business together.
By 1960 they had. Their company, trading at first as Tourists International, sold duty-free liquor and later cars to American military personnel, following the fleets and the bases. It was a mail-order and logistics business more than a retail one: the partners needed agents in ports, a reliable way to take orders, and suppliers who would ship to the United States.
Then came a lead that changed the company's direction. Passing through Honolulu in 1960, Miller stayed with Peter Fithian, another Cornell hotel school friend, who ran the airport's lei greeting concession. Fithian heard that the new terminal being built at Honolulu International Airport would include a duty-free concession, the first of its kind in the United States. In the spring of 1962, with about a week to prepare, Feeney and Miller assembled a bid and won it. The same year they opened a store at the airport in Hong Kong. Those two small concessions, both opened in 1962, were the start of what became DFS.
The Japanese Wave
For the first few years the airport stores were a sideline to the military business, and the military business was in trouble. By 1965 the partners had expanded it too fast and without adequate financial controls. The rules on what servicemen could bring home had also tightened, which cut into margins. Miller, on his honeymoon in Malaysia, got a call from Feeney in New York telling him the company was in a financial crisis. They decided to close the military operations, which took about two years of shutting offices, collecting debts and delivering cars already ordered.
What saved them was a decision made in Tokyo. Since the end of the Second World War, the Japanese government had restricted foreign travel to business people, officials and a few other categories. From April 1, 1964, ahead of the Tokyo Olympics that October, ordinary Japanese citizens were allowed to travel abroad as tourists. In 1964 fewer than 130,000 Japanese travelled overseas. Within nine years the figure was about 2.3 million.
The new tourists had money, a strong culture of bringing gifts home, and high domestic taxes on imported luxury goods. Hawaii and Hong Kong were among the first places they went. Feeney and Miller found queues forming outside their stores. The cash from the airport shops paid off the military business's obligations, and by 1967 the airport concessions were all that remained.
Feeney's years in Japan now paid off. He was a natural linguist and learned enough Japanese to deal personally with the tour operators and customers who drove the business. DFS hired Japanese-speaking staff, stocked the brands Japanese buyers asked for, and worked with tour companies to route groups through its stores. When some of the grand French houses refused to sell to an upstart American retailer, DFS built up relationships with smaller ones. The Camus family's cognac house supplied it when Hennessy and Martell would not, and DFS helped turn Camus into a name Japanese tourists sought out. Eventually the larger houses came around.
In 1966 two minority shareholders joined the partnership: Alan Parker, a British tax lawyer, and Anthony Pilaro, an American lawyer and accountant who designed the company's intricate ownership structure. Feeney and Miller each held 38.75 percent. In 1968 DFS opened its first downtown duty-free store, in Kowloon, allowing tourists to shop in the city and collect their purchases at the airport. Over the following years it bid for and won concessions in Anchorage, San Francisco, Guam, Saipan, Sydney and New Zealand, among others. Those bids were fiercely competitive and secretive, and O'Clery's biography makes clear that DFS fought hard to keep rivals out.
By the 1970s the partners were collecting enormous cash dividends, hundreds of millions of dollars a year at the peak. Feeney had become one of the richest Americans alive.
The Discomfort of Wealth
He did not enjoy it. The Feeneys lived well for a time, with homes in several countries, but Feeney grew uneasy with what money was doing to the people around it, and he worried about its effect on his own children. He found he took no pleasure in expensive things. Friends and colleagues describe a man who flew economy, wore a cheap watch and drugstore reading glasses, and carried his papers in a plastic bag. Late in life he did not own a house or a car.
His thinking was shaped by Andrew Carnegie, whose 1889 essay on wealth argued that a rich man's surplus was a trust to be administered for the public good during his lifetime, and that the man who dies rich dies disgraced. Feeney took the argument more literally than Carnegie himself had. Andrew Carnegie gave away most of his fortune, but Feeney aimed to give away all of it.
He began by building a machine to manage money for giving. In 1980 he founded General Atlantic, a private investment firm set up to invest the funds he planned to use for philanthropy. It later became one of the best-known growth equity firms in the world. In 1982 he and his family established the Atlantic Foundation in Bermuda, where he was then resident. Its first grant went to Cornell to fund a scholarship programme.
Then, in 1984, he made the decision that defined the rest of his life. He irrevocably transferred his entire 38.75 percent stake in DFS, then worth roughly $500 million, to the foundation. He made provision for his wife and children and kept a small sum for himself. Everything else, including every future dividend from the business he had built, now belonged to the foundation.
The Bermuda structure was chosen with care. American law barred private foundations from holding such a large share of a single business, so Feeney could not have given his DFS stake to a U.S. foundation. Bermuda imposed no such limit. The structure also cost him something: because the gift went to a foreign foundation, he took no U.S. tax deduction for it. As a U.S. citizen he continued to pay tax on his own income. The trade bought him privacy. Harvey Dale, the New York tax lawyer who became Atlantic's president, explained later that a low-key, anonymous style of giving would have been impossible from a U.S. base.
Fifteen Years Undercover
For the next fifteen years Atlantic gave away hundreds of millions of dollars while almost nobody knew where the money came from. Grants were paid by cashier's cheque. Recipients were told the money came from a consulting firm acting for anonymous donors, and were warned not to ask questions. If they discovered the source and made it public, the funding would stop. Feeney himself, when he visited projects, presented himself as one of a group of concerned Americans.
Meanwhile Forbes kept listing him among the richest people in the country. He disliked the list, but correcting it would have exposed the foundation, so he let the fiction stand.
Anonymity was never passivity. Feeney travelled almost constantly, circling the globe several times a year, visiting the people doing the work and looking for places where a large sum could change the trajectory of an institution. He passed on ideas by handing people articles or pages torn from magazines. He preferred to go to beneficiaries rather than summon them, and when people tried to thank him he would turn it back on them, telling them it was he who should thank them for doing good things with the money.
The pattern of his giving followed the pattern of his business career. At DFS he had profited by moving early into markets others underrated, such as Hawaii before the Japanese boom. As a philanthropist he looked for undervalued places and people, and he liked to use his money to pull in matching funds from governments.
Ireland was the clearest example. In the late 1980s John Healy, head of the Irish American Partnership, introduced Feeney to Ed Walsh, president of a struggling technical college in Limerick called the National Institute for Higher Education. Feeney saw a chance to build something, and the money followed. From 1990 Atlantic funded research, conference and cultural facilities, and the college, by then the University of Limerick, was transformed. Over the following years every university on the island of Ireland received tens of millions of dollars.
His largest Irish intervention came in the late 1990s, when government spending on university research was tiny. Atlantic offered to put up £75 million if the Irish state would match it. Feeney went to see the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, himself; the Irish Times noted that his glasses were held together with a paper clip. The result was the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions, which reshaped research funding in Irish universities. The same logic appeared in Queensland, Australia, where Atlantic paid about a third of the cost of a large cancer research centre and the state and federal governments supplied the rest.
Some of the work was quieter still. In the early 1990s Feeney joined a small group of Irish American figures, organised by the publisher Niall O'Dowd, who tried to persuade the IRA to abandon violence for politics. With White House approval, he paid for a Sinn Féin office in Washington out of his own salary from the foundation, and he also funded loyalist politicians. From 1991 Atlantic backed reconciliation and civil society groups in Northern Ireland and the border counties. When his support for Sinn Féin became public in the mid-1990s it drew criticism, but participants in the peace process have since credited the Irish American group with helping to bring about the ceasefire and, eventually, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
The Sale and the Split
By the mid-1990s the duty-free business was past its peak. Japanese spending was slowing, and Feeney wanted liquid assets that his foundation could give away. In October 1996 LVMH, the French luxury group led by Bernard Arnault, agreed to buy a controlling interest in DFS for $2.47 billion. Feeney's foundation and Alan Parker together held about 58 percent and agreed to sell.
Bob Miller was bitterly opposed. He and Pilaro went to court in New York, arguing among other things that the sale breached a 1991 agreement requiring the partners to submit disputes to a neutral arbiter, and that LVMH competed with DFS as a supplier. The relationship between the two founders was already strained, partly over Feeney's separate retail ventures in Hawaii, which Miller regarded as competition. The litigation would inevitably expose the 1984 transfer, and so Feeney chose to tell the story first, in the Times.
The deal went through. Pilaro sold early in 1997. Miller kept his stake and stayed in business alongside LVMH. The foundation received about $1.6 billion for its shares, and Feeney set aside $26 million for farewell payments to some 2,400 long-serving DFS employees. The two co-founders, who had met by chance in Barcelona forty years earlier, never spoke again.
The public reaction to the disclosure was overwhelmingly admiring. Time named Feeney among the people who had shaped 1997 and wrote that his giving already ranked among the grandest of any living American. Asked why he lived so simply, he gave the Times a line that would follow him for the rest of his life.
— Chuck Feeney, to The New York Times, 1997Money has an attraction for some people, but nobody can wear two pairs of shoes at one time.
Deciding to Finish
The sale left Atlantic with assets of several billion dollars and a problem Feeney had not faced before. Anonymity no longer shielded the foundation, and a larger institution with hundreds of staff began to develop its own ideas about how the money should be spent. The staff grew; regional offices opened in Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Vietnam, Australia and Bermuda.
In 2003 Feeney settled the question that shapes every large foundation. Atlantic would not exist in perpetuity. It would spend every dollar it had within his lifetime and then close. Limited-life foundations were not unknown, but none of this size had committed to spending out entirely on a fixed schedule. The decision turned the endowment from something to be preserved into something to be used up, and it gave the whole organisation a deadline.
It also led to conflict. At one point directors of the foundation tried to restrict Feeney's ability to make large capital grants, the "big bets" on buildings and institutions that he favoured. The Irish Times described the dispute as ugly, and his health suffered during it. Feeney prevailed, and afterwards made the largest capital grant in the foundation's history.
That grant went to New York. In 2011 the city ran a competition for a new applied science and engineering campus, and Cornell, in partnership with the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, won the right to build on Roosevelt Island. Atlantic, anonymously at first, gave $350 million to fund much of the first phase and create an endowment. It was the largest grant in Cornell's history and one of the largest ever made to higher education. Frank Rhodes, the former Cornell president, called Feeney the university's third founder, after Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White.
In February 2011 Feeney also signed the Giving Pledge, the campaign launched in 2010 by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade the world's richest people to give away at least half their wealth. Both men have said he helped inspire it. His pledge letter was a compact statement of everything he had been doing for thirty years.
— Chuck Feeney, Giving Pledge letter, 2011I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living—to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition.
Where the Money Went
When Atlantic's accounts were totalled, the foundation had supported nearly 2,500 grantees, with an average grant of about $1.2 million. The largest share, about $3.7 billion, went to education, health care and university research, including close to $1 billion for Cornell. More than $870 million went to human rights and social change, including $62 million for efforts to abolish the death penalty in the United States and $76 million for grassroots campaigns supporting the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
In Vietnam, where Feeney had first travelled as a businessman, Atlantic spent heavily on public health and hospitals; one grant of about $270 million supported improvements to the public health system. In South Africa it funded human rights, health equity and justice organisations after apartheid. In Australia it financed research facilities in Queensland. In Bermuda it supported local nonprofits. In the Republic of Ireland alone it gave well over $1 billion, and Northern Ireland received hundreds of millions more.
Not everything worked. A $5 million commitment to a Centre for Public Inquiry in Dublin in 2005 collapsed amid controversy. Atlantic's own retrospective documents are candid about grants that failed to produce lasting change. Feeney accepted that a willingness to make large bets meant some would be lost.
The final large commitments, made in 2016, went to people. Atlantic set aside about $740 million to create the Atlantic Fellows, a set of programmes intended to build a global network of thousands of leaders working on health, equity and social justice over the following two decades. About $177 million of that went to the Global Brain Health Institute, a joint venture between Trinity College Dublin and the University of California, San Francisco, focused on dementia. The last grant of all, $7 million, went to Cornell, the institution that had received the first.
Zero Is the Hero
On September 14, 2020, in San Francisco, Feeney signed the documents dissolving The Atlantic Philanthropies. The pandemic meant the ceremony took place over Zoom, with the foundation's board watching remotely, and his wife Helga and Atlantic's chief executive, Christopher Oechsli, in the room. Bill Gates and the former California governor Jerry Brown sent video messages. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, sent a letter of thanks on behalf of Congress. Feeney was eighty-nine.
He lived in a rented apartment in San Francisco that Steven Bertoni of Forbes, who visited him, compared to a freshman dorm room. Printed photographs of family and friends hung on the walls. On the table was a small plaque congratulating him on $8 billion of giving. When Bertoni had first met him in 2012, Feeney estimated that he had set aside about $2 million for his and Helga's retirement.
His message to other rich people was always short. He told Forbes in 2020 that the foundation had learned a lot, that he would do some things differently, and that he was very satisfied to have finished on his watch. For anyone wondering whether to follow his example, he had four words: try it, you'll like it. In a 2019 report the foundation titled Zero Is the Hero, he put the argument in slightly more detail.
— Chuck Feeney, Zero Is the Hero, The Atlantic Philanthropies, 2019I see little reason to delay giving when so much good can be achieved through supporting worthwhile causes. Besides, it's a lot more fun to give while you live than give while you're dead.
Buffett, whose own fortune will be distributed after his death, told Forbes that Feeney was a model for everyone and that it would take Buffett's estate years after his death to accomplish what Feeney had done in his lifetime. Buffett also liked to repeat something Feeney had told him: that he wanted his last cheque to bounce.
Chuck Feeney died at home in San Francisco on October 9, 2023, aged ninety-two. He was survived by Helga, by his first wife Danielle, and by their five children. His name is not carved on any of the buildings he paid for across five continents. A few campuses, including the University of Limerick, have named a road Feeney Way.
The shape of his life is unusual among great fortunes. Most rich philanthropists earn first and give later, often after death, through institutions designed to outlast them. Feeney reversed the order of priorities. He treated the fortune as a temporary pool of capital, kept the gratitude to a minimum, and set a date for the pool to run dry. In the Irish phrase he liked to quote, there are no pockets in a shroud.
Part IIThe Playbook
Feeney ran two careers, retailer and philanthropist, on the same operating system: move early into undervalued places, make large concentrated bets, stay close to the work and keep the overhead of ego close to zero. The principles below are drawn from how he built DFS, how he structured Atlantic, and how he chose to finish. Most of them apply as well to a founder allocating capital as to a donor giving it away.
The principles
- 1.Find the demand that regulation is about to release.
- 2.Build the back office before the boom.
- 3.Learn the customer's language, literally.
- 4.Make the irreversible decision early.
- 5.Choose the structure that serves the mission, even at a cost.
- 6.Remove your name from the transaction.
- 7.Bet big on undervalued places.
- 8.Use your money to move other money.
- 9.Set a date to finish.
- 10.Go and see the work.
- 11.Keep your personal burn rate trivial.
Principle 1
Find the demand that regulation is about to release.
DFS was a small airport concession until Japan lifted its restrictions on tourist travel in April 1964. Then the business became enormous, because a large population with savings, a gift-giving culture and high domestic luxury taxes was suddenly free to travel, and Feeney's stores were standing where the first tourists arrived.
The lesson is less about luck than about position. Feeney and Miller already held the Honolulu and Hong Kong concessions when the rules changed, and Feeney already understood Japan from his Air Force years. When a rule change released pent-up demand, they were ready to serve it at once.
The same pattern recurs whenever a government loosens a constraint: a travel ban, a licensing regime, a capital control. The winners are usually those who were positioned before the change, not those who react after it.
Tactic: List the regulations that currently suppress demand in your market. For each, ask what would happen in the first year after it was lifted, and what you would need to have in place already to capture that first wave.
Principle 2
Build the back office before the boom.
The 1965 crisis nearly finished Feeney and Miller before the Japanese boom began. They had expanded the military business across many offices without adequate financial controls, and when margins tightened they found themselves close to insolvency. Miller later said the near-miss taught them the importance of the back office and of having the right financial people in place.
The timing was fortunate. By the time Japanese tourists were queueing outside the airport stores, the partners had learned, painfully, how to control cash, inventory and staff across multiple locations. Growth that arrives before those controls exist tends to destroy the business it is supposed to enrich.
Tactic: Before your next expansion, test whether your finance function could tell you, within a week, the cash position and margin of every unit you operate. If it cannot, fix that first.
Principle 3
Learn the customer's language, literally.
Feeney learned enough Japanese to deal directly with the tour operators and shoppers who drove DFS. The company hired Japanese-speaking staff and stocked what Japanese travellers asked for, including brands that were little known elsewhere. That fluency was a competitive advantage that bigger, better-connected retailers failed to match.
Speaking the customer's language builds trust and shortens negotiations, but it also changes what you notice. Feeney could hear what customers wanted before it reached a sales report, and that let DFS build relationships with suppliers such as Camus while the grander French houses were still refusing to deal.
Tactic: Identify your most important customer segment and spend a period working in its native environment, whether that means its language, its industry jargon or its workflow, until you can hold a real conversation without an intermediary.
Principle 4
Make the irreversible decision early.
In 1984, in his early fifties, Feeney transferred his entire DFS stake to his foundation, irrevocably. He did it at the height of his earning years, long before any estate planner would have advised it, and he retained only enough for his family's needs.
Making the gift irrevocable removed the temptation to renegotiate with himself later. Every subsequent dividend, and eventually the $1.6 billion from the LVMH sale, flowed to the foundation automatically. His wealth stopped being a personal question and became an operational one: how to deploy it well.
Irreversible commitments are powerful precisely because they eliminate future options. Used carefully, they protect a long-term intention from short-term second thoughts.
Tactic: For your most important long-term goal, find one commitment you can make now that cannot easily be undone, and make it while your resolve is strongest rather than waiting for a better moment.
Principle 5
Choose the structure that serves the mission, even at a cost.
Feeney set up his foundation in Bermuda because a U.S. foundation could not have held his DFS shares and could not have operated anonymously. The choice had a real price: he took no U.S. tax deduction for a gift worth roughly $500 million. He judged that the freedom to give quietly, and to keep the business inside the foundation, was worth more than the tax saving.
Most people optimise structures for tax or convenience and then fit the mission around them. Feeney worked the other way, deciding first what he wanted the foundation to do and then accepting whatever structure made that possible.
Tactic: When setting up a company, fund or partnership, write down the two or three things the structure must allow you to do. Reject any option that fails those tests, however efficient it looks on a spreadsheet.
Principle 6
Remove your name from the transaction.
For fifteen years Atlantic's beneficiaries did not know who was funding them. Feeney insisted on this partly from temperament and partly for practical reasons. Without his name attached, grants could not become status symbols for the donor, grantees could not tailor proposals to flatter him, and he could meet people and learn without being treated as a celebrity.
Anonymity also changed the relationship with recipients. Because he wanted nothing back, including recognition, the conversation stayed focused on the work. Atlantic's later president described the aim as combining humility with the ability to fly under the radar and stay nimble.
The principle extends beyond philanthropy. Leaders who keep their own status out of decisions tend to hear more candid information and make choices that are easier to defend on the merits.
Tactic: On your next significant decision, ask how you would choose if no one would ever know it was yours. If the answer differs from your current plan, your reputation is shaping the decision more than it should.
Principle 7
Bet big on undervalued places.
Feeney's philanthropy concentrated large sums in places that established donors overlooked: a struggling technical college in Limerick, public health in Vietnam, research capacity in Queensland, and a neglected island in New York's East River. His grants averaged well over $1 million, and the biggest ran to hundreds of millions.
This was DFS logic applied to giving. As a retailer he had gone to Honolulu before the tourists came. As a philanthropist he looked for institutions where an injection of capital could change the trajectory rather than add a marginal increment. A large bet in an undervalued place can move the whole system, while the same sum spread across a hundred fashionable causes rarely moves anything.
Tactic: Review where your resources are spread thin. Identify the single place where a concentrated investment could change the outcome decisively, and consider pulling resources from elsewhere to fund it.
Principle 8
Use your money to move other money.
Feeney liked matching arrangements. In Ireland, Atlantic offered £75 million for university research if the government would match it, and the state agreed, creating a national research programme. In Queensland, Atlantic paid about a third of the cost of a cancer research centre, and the state and federal governments paid the rest.
Matching turned a private grant into public commitment. It multiplied the capital available, and it gave governments ownership of the result, which made the programmes more likely to survive after Atlantic left.
Tactic: Before committing capital to a project, ask who else should be paying for it and structure your commitment as a match that is conditional on their participation.
Principle 9
Set a date to finish.
In 2003 Feeney decided that Atlantic would spend all its money in his lifetime and then close. The fixed end date changed the institution. It could no longer protect its endowment or hedge its bets. It had to find large, worthwhile uses for billions of dollars within a known span, and it had time to document what it had learned before it shut.
Foundations designed to last forever tend to become cautious, because preserving capital becomes a goal in itself. A deadline forces choices, concentrates attention and makes a large bet today look better than a small one repeated indefinitely.
Tactic: Give your next major initiative a fixed end date and a rule that unused resources will be redeployed elsewhere. Watch how the deadline changes the quality of decisions along the way.
Principle 10
Go and see the work.
Even when he was hiding his identity, Feeney travelled constantly to visit the people and places he funded. He went to beneficiaries rather than summoning them. He met university presidents, hospital directors and activists on their own ground and drew his own conclusions.
Distant funders rely on reports, and reports are shaped by what the writer thinks the reader wants to hear. Feeney's visits gave him an independent read on the quality of leaders and the reality of projects, and they helped him spot the next opportunity before it was written up in a proposal.
Tactic: For each of your three biggest commitments, schedule an in-person visit in the next quarter with no formal agenda. Ask the people doing the work what they would do with more resources and what they would stop doing.
Principle 11
Keep your personal burn rate trivial.
Feeney owned no house or car in later life, flew economy and lived in small apartments. His frugality was personal preference, but it also had a strategic effect: because he needed almost nothing, he could give almost everything, and no lifestyle cost ever competed with the mission for his money.
A low personal burn rate is a source of freedom. It removes the pressure to preserve wealth for its own sake and makes bold decisions easier, because the downside to the decision-maker is small.
Tactic: Calculate what you actually need to live well. Treat anything above that figure as capital available for your highest-value purpose, and decide deliberately where it should go.
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Part IIIMaxims
- Wealth is a tool, not a trophy. Feeney measured his fortune by what it did, not by how large it looked on a rich list.
- Gratitude is a cost. Every thank-you dinner and named building consumes attention that could go to the work, which is why he brushed thanks aside.
- Tell the story before someone else does. When a lawsuit threatened to expose him, Feeney called the Times himself and shaped how the secret came out.
- Near-death experiences are cheap tuition. The 1965 crisis taught discipline that made the later boom survivable.
- Perpetuity breeds caution. Institutions built to last forever tend to protect their capital rather than use it.
- Loyalty compounds. Cornell received Atlantic's first grant, its last and nearly $1 billion in between; a long relationship made the biggest bets easier to judge.
- Partnerships end. Even a forty-year alliance can break over a single sale; put the terms of exit in writing while the friendship is strong.
- Failures come with big bets. A foundation that never loses a grant is not taking enough risk.
- Your last cheque should bounce. Feeney told Buffett he wanted to finish with nothing left, and very nearly did.
In Their Own Words
I had one idea that never changed in my mind—that you should use your wealth to help people.— Chuck Feeney
I believe strongly in 'giving while living.' I see little reason to delay giving when so much good can be achieved through supporting worthwhile causes today.— Chuck Feeney
I want to give the money away while I'm still around to see the results.— Chuck Feeney
What's the point of being the richest man in the cemetery? You can't do any good then.— Chuck Feeney
People used to ask me how I got rich. I never got rich. I made a lot of money and gave it all away. That's not getting rich, that's getting even.— Chuck Feeney
The good you can do today is better than the good you might do tomorrow.— Chuck Feeney
I've never been interested in putting my name on buildings. What's important is the work that goes on inside them.— Chuck Feeney
Anonymous giving is not about being modest. It's about being effective.— Chuck Feeney
The best philanthropy is constantly in search of the finalities—a search for a cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source.— Chuck Feeney
I learned that people don't give to charity out of the goodness of their hearts necessarily. They give because they get something back.— Chuck Feeney
Success is not about accumulating wealth, but about what you do with the opportunities you're given.— Chuck Feeney
In business, you have to be willing to take calculated risks. In philanthropy, you have to be willing to take calculated risks for others.— Chuck Feeney
The duty-free business taught me that location and timing are everything. The same is true in philanthropy.— Chuck Feeney
I've always believed that if you have good health and a roof over your head, you're ahead of most people in the world.— Chuck Feeney
Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying.— Chuck Feeney
You can only wear one pair of pants at a time.— Chuck Feeney
I had a very simple lifestyle. I flew coach, I stayed in modest hotels, I carried my papers in a plastic bag. People thought I was eccentric, but it was just practical.— Chuck Feeney
I want to be remembered as someone who used his good fortune to help others have a better life.— Chuck Feeney
The legacy I want to leave is not buildings with my name on them, but positive changes in people's lives.— Chuck Feeney
Giving while living is not a slogan. It's a way of thinking about your responsibility to others.— Chuck Feeney
I've been blessed with good luck in business and good health in life. The least I can do is share that good fortune with others.— Chuck Feeney
Further reading
- Billionaire Who Wasn't by Conor O'Clery
