盖茨,巴菲特:分享自己的财富

Emmy-nominated American Morning, cnn, weekday 6 ET.

This is a bizarre story. Bill Gates and Buffett sent out a letter, saying, you know, this hall of billionaires is gonna meet. We are gonna have lunch, and then we are gonna talk you out half of your money, right?

Well, I guess it is. You could think about it that way. It didn't strike me as totally bizarre.

Cuz you travel in different circles than I do.

Well, I guess so. I do know both of those guys. So I guess so, and Melinda. So I guess that's true.

So what is the idea here?

The idea is that Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, both of whom have promised practically all of their network to charity, think that it would be a good idea to encourage other billionaires to do the same thing. It's just that simple. They like to get people…, they like to change American behaviour because right now all the evidence indicates that billionaires do not give that much to charity. So that's, that's the point.

And so specifically they say either now or when you croak, you give half your money to charity.

That's right.

Do they care which charity?

No, they care not at all. As a matter of fact, Bill says that part of the charm of living in America is the diversity, and actually Americans are really very generous as a whole in giving money to charity, better than any other country.

Now the secret is out. (Yes.) Was it a secret? Were they trying to keep this as a secret?

They were. They've been reticent about a year and a half. And at first they didn't know what they were going to do, they didn't know what their strategy was going to be as far as encouraging billionaires to give more. But then they came up with this idea of the pledge. And all along, it's been quite secret. Because one dinner that they had was leaked, and all sorts of conspiracy theorists emerged.

What's going on here? A secret government.

Absolutely, absolutely. So they sort of kept it under wraps because they realized that it would be better to really try to announce it and give a full disclosure of what they were trying to do, which we did in Fortune.

So did this secret society stand up at the end of this dinner? What, Ophra was there, right? (Right.) Who else was there? David Rockefeller? Was he a host?

David Rockefeller was a host. Ted Turner, three Wall Street...

All these people have already given away tons of money.

The first dinner, and next week, all of the three dinners that they had, the intention was to get billionaires who had demonstrated that they were good at giving their money away and wanted to give it away…

And now they are gonna go after the tightwads. I got you.

Right, that's right. So the idea was to get thoughts about how do we go after these people.

And do they have thoughts on how they do it? Will they guild them into it basically?

Well, there is a lot of peer pressure here. There's no question about that. I think that's been proved by other fundraising things. I think that many of the billionaires out there will immediately sign up for this pledge that they’d like to have. And there'll be others who will come along more slowly and more reluctantly. I think all of the principles the Gates's and Warren think, that it would take a while.

Well, Karen and I are gonna pledge right now to give half the money in our wallets. (Okay, me too. All right, I'll go with that.) That's about seven bucks, I think.

Oh, okay, that's, that's something, right?

Right, it is something. Carol Loomis, hey, pleasure to have you join us. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you, I’d love to be here. Thank you.