Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge has recently recruited 18 more very wealthy Americans to the list that now includes 58 people and families in total. The new pledge members include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, his Harvard room mate and Facebook co founder Dustin Moskovitz and Ted Forstmann. Carl Icahn is the wealthiest of the new donors with his $11 billion net worth ranking him 24th on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list.

The Giving Pledge was started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to try and persuade America’s wealthiest businessmen, entrepreneurs and high society families to pledge to give away the majority of their wealth either during their lifetime or after their death. With the 58 pledges so far eventual donations to charities and worthy causes could be at least $139 billion, that is money not to be sniffed at!

That figure is just going from what most of the pledges have at the moment and due to their nature most of these people will carry on making money and with good wealth management that figure is only going to rise. All of the people involved have to write a letter saying why they want to pledge and this is what Carl Icahn wrote in his

“I made a commitment over 20 years ago that substantially all of my assets would be used to fund a charitable foundation. Until Bill, Melinda and Warren started this project, I never considered going public with my intentions. However, I certainly see the value of a project that encourages wealthy individuals to step forward and commit to use their wealth for the common good. I hope that by adding my voice with those who are supporting this project, we will all encourage others to participate.”

A lot of others also said they shared that sentiment and they have always been giving very generously to charity and have always stayed quite quiet about it because giving to charity and then bragging about it is not a very clever thing to do. However they now see that joining this pledge will inspire others to do the same and that is always a good thing.