Robin Curtis 💙🇺🇦 @planetkooler.bsky.social

In the 1990s, passengers flying coach from Hong Kong to New York sometimes noticed an older man in wrinkled clothes carrying papers in a plastic grocery bag. Cheap watch. No luxury luggage. No first-class seat. Most people assumed he was struggling financially. In reality, he was a billionaire. And he had already secretly given most of his fortune away. His name was Chuck Feeney. He co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960 and helped build it into one of the most successful luxury retail businesses in the world. By the 1980s, he was worth billions. But unlike most billionaires, Chuck lived almost like an ordinary middle-class traveler. He flew economy. Rented modest apartments. Owned no mansion. Wore a $15 Casio watch. Carried reading papers in plastic bags. Even some business associates thought he might secretly be broke. What nobody realized was that Chuck had quietly transferred nearly all of his wealth into a private foundation years earlier. Then he began giving it away anonymously. Hospitals. Universities. AIDS treatment programs. Human rights groups. Medical research. Peace initiatives in Northern Ireland. For years, institutions received enormous donations without knowing who funded them. Chuck wanted it that way. He believed philanthropy should focus on the work not the ego of the donor. And he didn’t want to spend his life attending galas and rejecting endless requests for money. So he disappeared behind the scenes while billions quietly changed lives around the world. The truth only became public in 1997 after a major business sale exposed financial documents revealing what he had done. By then, he had already given away hundreds of millions. Eventually it became billions. In total, Chuck Feeney donated roughly $8 billion during his lifetime. Warren Buffett called him: “My hero.” Bill Gates studied his approach. When Buffett and Gates launched the Giving Pledge encouraging billionaires to donate their fortunes, Chuck had already done it decades earlier. But what made Chuck different was not just how much he gave away. It was when. He didn’t wait until death. He didn’t build a foundation designed to exist forever. He believed wealth should be used while the giver was still alive to see the impact. “Dead people don’t give money,” he often said. In 2020, at age 89, Chuck officially closed his foundation after successfully giving away virtually everything. Then he said something simple: “Try giving while living. You’ll like it.” Chuck Feeney died in 2023 at age 92. No giant estate. No palace. No massive inheritance battle. Just hospitals built. Students educated. Lives saved. And billions of dollars already out in the world doing what he believed money was meant to do.

The study, below, doesn’t take account of the many sequelae of Covid (eg heart attacks, strokes, an acquired immune deficiency syndrome) yet still estimates its cost to USA as over £8bn. It will be way more than that. Society simply can’t afford to continue to ignore it…

🇱🇧🇮🇱 Dahiye is emptying out. The last time Israel warned Beirut's southern suburbs, they flattened them. People who lived through that don't need to be told twice. Source: WarFront Witness