The 12 guests at a May 2009 dinner that legendary Fortune financial journalist Carol Loomis exclusively reported on in a 2010 cover story had, she wrote, “a combined net worth of maybe $130 billion and a serious history of having depleted that amount by giving money to charity.”
They included the gathering’s instigators, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and its host, the banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller. Also around the table: multibillionaire and then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, investor and philanthropist George Soros, and media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.
This, Loomis pronounced, was “the biggest fundraising drive in history.”
Indeed, the Giving Pledge, which came out of a series of discussions kicked off by that dinner, has gone on to be a juggernaut. When Gates, his then wife Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett came up with the idea of a pledge for ultrawealthy people willing to donate half their net worth to charity at or before their death, Bill Gates told Fortune recently, they “got started with the hope that maybe we get 50 to 80 like-minded philanthropists.” As of last July there were 244.
This week, Fortune’s Geoff Colvin and Alexa Mikhail reported on Gates’ own pledge to give “virtually all” of his remaining fortune—a little over $100 billion—to the foundation that he and French Gates started 25 years ago, now called the Gates Foundation. The foundation will spend down $200 billion (including its current endowment and investment growth) over the next 20 years, largely on global public health projects to eradicate or reduce diseases that affect the world’s poorest. Then, Gates announced Thursday, the foundation will shut down.
Gates gave Fortune exclusive access to his plans several months before Thursday’s announcement, sitting for two interviews to lay out the thinking behind his decision and allowing us a behind-the-scenes look at the massive foundation’s operations in Seattle and South Africa. The foundation’s president, Mark Suzman; other leaders at the organization; and French Gates also spoke with Fortune about the work of the foundation and their plans for the future.
But that’s perhaps nothing compared to the access that Loomis had to the billionaires present at that May 2009 dinner. In breaking the news of that fateful evening, she offered a journalistic disclosure that doubled as the ultimate journalistic flex:
“I am a longtime friend of Buffett’s and editor of his annual letter to Berkshire’s shareholders,” she wrote. “Through him, my husband, John Loomis, and I have also come to know Melinda and Bill Gates socially. The Loomis team has even occasionally played bridge against Warren and Bill.”
