If you’re old enough, you may remember the 1985 movie Brewster’s Millions. Richard Pryor plays a minor league baseball player, Monty Brewster, who inherits $30 million from a long-lost relative. But there’s a catch: if he can spend it all in 30 days, without any property remaining, then he’ll inherit $300 million. Also, he can’t tell anyone what he’s doing. So Monty—to his closest friends (one of them played by John Candy)—looks like he’s squandering a once-in-a-lifetime inheritance. Along the way, he learns how badly wealth can ruin our relationships and happiness.
Part of what makes the movie so fun is how hard it is for him to spend the money. Not emotionally hard, but practically hard. Big piles of money, it turns out, attract even more money.
As of May 8, 2025, the Gates Foundation is Monty Brewster.
If you didn’t see the news, Bill Gates announced that he will give away all of his wealth, currently around $113 billion. It will all be done through the Gates Foundation, which over the last 25 years has spent $100 billion in grants and operations around the world to fight disease, fund education, and reduce poverty. Additionally, the Gates Foundation will close its doors on December 31, 2045. This deadline, originally set for 20 years after Bill’s death, got moved up by a few decades.
There are so many interesting things about this decision, like bucking the trend of legacy foundations that live forever and how the money may be all given away before he dies. (He’ll be 90 at the end of 2045.)
But the most interesting thing is how hard it’s going to be to actually give it away effectively.
Why Effective Giving Is Hard at Scale
Briefly, I feel like I should answer the very reasonable question, “What’s so hard about giving money away?” The answer is, “Nothing.” If the only challenge is getting the money out of Bill Gates’ accounts and into other people’s pockets, he could do it all rather quickly. We’d all be happy to help, if it came to that. :)
The hard part is giving the money away so that it does what Gates wants it to do, like eliminate neglected tropical diseases for 200 million kids, improve sanitation for the 1.5 billion people without a flush toilet, or create financial access for the 25% of adults who don’t have something as simple as a bank account. These are just a handful of the very tough problems the Gates Foundation has been working to solve for 25 years.
There are some problems, like delivery of medical treatments, that just require money. (This is why Gates took a widely publicized jab at Elon Musk and DOGE for dismantling life-saving USAID programs. No doubt Gates will be doing what he can to fill the gap.) But many problems are not only a function of money. Solving these sorts of problems requires political willpower, or inventions that don’t yet exist, or a cost far beyond what Gates will be able to fund. For example, in his book Impact, Sir Ronald Cohen estimated that meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals would cost $30 trillion. That’s about 150 times what Gates plans to give away.
Gates’ Giving Will Be Historic
Knowing how hard this will be, it explains why this scale of giving is historically unprecedented. By the time John D. Rockefeller died, he’d given away $540 million or about $12 billion in 2025 dollars. Andrew Carnegie gave away $350 million, equivalent to around $6 billion today. In fact, it was Carnegie’s essay, The Gospel of Wealth, that Gates credits for his philanthropic passion. Carnegie famously wrote that “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
A modern equivalent of this level of giving has been MacKenzie Scott. She’s also broken the mold of billionaire philanthropy by giving away $19.2 billion over the last five years. Notably, her giving has been almost entirely unrestricted and unsolicited by the nonprofits she chose. Instead of typically resource-intensive grant applications, Scott’s relied on a quiet vetting process guided by experts like those at the Lever for Change Foundation. (I have a delightful and fascinating podcast episode with their CEO, Dr. Cecilia Conrad. You should give it a listen.)
It Will Probably Be More Than $200b
The Gates Foundation will be increasing their grant-making to $10 billion per year in order to try and give the money away by 2045. Whether or not that’s enough to keep pace with the Brewster-esque goal remains to be seen. There’s some lack of clarity around this, based on what Gates has said. He noted that, depending on market trends, the Foundation will give away around $200 billion by 2045.
Between the $113 billion he currently owns, and the $77 billion already managed by the Foundation trust, this amount of wealth collectively creates at least $10 billion in annual investment returns. There may be overlap between his wealth and the foundation trust, but I don’t think that’s the case. So I’m not sure why Gates estimated the $200 billion total, and he unquestionably knows far more about it than I do.
But I find this part of the problem fascinating. It’s just so much money to give away. Warren Buffett’s kids are going to be in a similar boat. They’ll be tasked with giving away ~$144 billion in just ten years. Between the two entities, nothing like this will have happened ever before.
To add important perspective, Americans collectively give about $550 billion per year to charity. All of this new philanthropy is still quite small compared to what’s already being given annually by everyday people.
But, there will still be amazing things to come. Since its inception, the Gates Foundation just through Gavi (vaccines) and the Global Fund (treatments for HIV, malaria, and TB) has helped save around 80 million lives. It’s incredible to imagine the good that can come from the next 20 years.
I think what’s most amazing is that the money will make big things possible, but it will be many thousands of people—experts and workers of all kinds—who will make it happen. These are the people who do the live-saving and life-changing work that Gates has funded. Perhaps those people will include some of you who are reading this. Like I said, amazing!
