As the first employee and president of a start-up that became eBay, Jeff Skoll sat atop a fortune when the company went public in 1998. In 2003, he started the Skoll Foundation, which, he says, has grown into the leading organization in the world supporting social entrepreneurs to drive large-scale impact. He signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. He also leads the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which deals with such dangers to humanity as climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics.
Five in six U.S. billionaires have taken a pass on signing up. The Chronicle takes a closer look at who is on the list and how they give.
The Chronicle contacted dozens of other signatories for comment on our new special report on the Giving Pledge. A few provided brief comments; most didn’t respond at all.
However, Skoll emailed a detailed response to our questions. He explained the profound impact the Giving Pledge has had on his life and his philanthropy.
This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Marc Gunther: What led you to take the Giving Pledge?
Jeff Skoll: Back when the Giving Pledge began, I was working with Bill Gates on the movie Waiting for Superman, about the U.S. education system. We had come to know each other a bit, and he knew that my philosophy was to give away most of my money to social causes before I died or at time of death. To date, I have contributed about half my fortune to such causes, and at time of death, everything goes to the Skoll Foundation.
So it wasn’t a difficult call for Bill to make when he, Melinda, and Warren started the Giving Pledge. I believe I was the fifth signatory.
One of the roles I enjoyed most was the opportunity to act as an evangelist to bring in other new members of the Giving Pledge. Along the way, I helped bring in Pierre Omidyar (my eBay partner), Steve Bing, Nicolas Berggruen, and Elon Musk, among others.
At the time, it hadn’t quite occurred to me that a few hours of my time eventually would bring billions of dollars for social causes. That certainly was time well spent. I remember co-hosting dinners in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and having conversations with my friends about joining. The cadre I brought in, mostly folks in their 40s, lowered the average age of the initial cohort by a couple of decades!
Gunther: Has the Giving Pledge influenced the amount of your giving or where you donate?
Skoll: The short answer is no, in that I had started my giving years before the Giving Pledge had started. My giving was global; I was a full-time philanthropist.
In the first annual Giving Pledge gathering, with about 100 attendees, including partners, I remember a breakout session during which the sessions were education, health, international, and other. Of the attendees, the vast majority were in education and health, the next set in “other” (which included arts, for example), and only four in “international.”
It occurred to me that most philanthropists (almost all U.S.-based at that time) were focused on their schools or hospitals (or art centers). While there is nothing wrong with that, it did surprise me that so many of the wealthiest philanthropists in the world did not realize that the greatest threats and opportunities in the world came from outside the traditional world of philanthropy.
I’m happy to say that as the Giving Pledge evolved, pledgers began to become cross-pollinated and recognize the opportunities to be involved in nontraditional philanthropy. Today the signatories are more involved in critical world issues than ever before and, I believe, recognize that their philanthropy is highly strategic even though the absolute dollars of philanthropy ($400 billion per year in the United States, for example) are tiny relative to the global GDP of $10 trillion. However, like in martial arts, it isn’t the size of the resources that matters; it is the timing and the impact.
Gunther: Can you elaborate?
Skoll: One small example from the early days of the Skoll Global Threats Fund is the swine flu. People were rightly scared, and there was only so much capacity to create vaccines. The Skoll Global Threats Fund, led by epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, realized that all the world’s vaccine productions had been bought out by developed-world countries, leaving nothing for the Southern Hemisphere.
We came up with a solution that some vaccine was better than none and partnered with the folks who made FluMist, an oral spray, to create a swine-flu vaccine that, while not 100 percent effective, was at least 50 percent effective or more. And as it turned out, the cost of the vaccine was pennies versus the dollars it would cost for the more traditional vaccine makers.
In the end, our product was available many weeks before the traditional “egg-based” vaccines were ready and were used by the developed countries before their own vaccines were ready. The money from these vaccines helped to vastly subsidize bringing the FluMist varietal to the Southern Hemisphere and saved countless lives.
In the end, neither the Skoll Global Threats Fund nor the Gates Foundation, our primary partner, needed to spend very much. But the outcomes were large, and we shudder to think of what might have happened had the disease made its way to the south unchecked and mutated into something else.
I’m not entirely sure this solution would have happened had Bill and I and Larry Brilliant not known each other in past times and more recently through the Giving Pledge.
Gunther: What, if anything, can wealthy philanthropists do to encourage people of any means to contribute?
Skoll: First off, it is important to believe that people are basically good and that good people will do the right thing most of the time. That is important as the problems in the world are overwhelming and times can be very disheartening. But time and again, we see people be good to their neighbor, to contribute when there are disasters or to lend a helping hand when one is needed. I personally believe that our own lives are improved through giving.
When I was younger, I backpacked around the world. There were times when I came across situations that were astounding to me. For example, in Mumbai, I remember seeing an area with very expensive condos — $5 million on up — and yet surrounding those condos were slums, disease, poor sanitation, poverty, beggars, people in pain, foul air, you name it.
It occurred to me that if everyone in those rich condos would dedicate some amount — say 10 percent — that they could help an immense number of people while also improving their own lives. To this day, I still remember those images and am still dumbfounded that we as a species have not quite realized that we are interconnected and the more good we do for one another the better off we all are.
Gunther: What is the role of your film company in your philanthropy? (Note: Skoll is the founder and chairman of Participant Media, which has made such films as An Inconvenient Truth, RBG, Spotlight, Green Book, and Roma.)
Skoll: Participant Media is entirely based on the precept that “people are basically good.” We tell stories and present information, and we trust that good people will do the right things when presented with the bigger picture and the human stories that go along with them. There are countless stories of people who have contributed, taken action, or been empowered through these stories.
Giving Pledgers have been very generous around Participant Media. From Bill and Melinda Gates, the Broad Foundation, from Mike Milken, Richard Branson, Tad Taube, Pierre Omidyar, Bill Ackman, and the Airbnb founders, to Hamdi Ulukaya, and so many others, Giving Pledge partners have participated in many Participant films and campaigns.
I am deeply grateful to so many of them, and I apologize if I am leaving some names off. The Giving Pledge group has truly been welcoming of the power of storytelling to advance social causes, and I can’t thank them enough for their support.
Gunther: Do you have any memorable moments from Giving Pledge events?
Skoll: There have been no end of great moments. David Rubenstein’s explanation of why he decided to invest (grant) huge amounts to preserved American monuments. I remember conversations with Jim Simons, Vinod Khosla, John Doerr, Richard Branson on the day that President Trump decided to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreements. We together agreed on strategies to work toward furthering our climate goals in the absence of the federal government.
One of my favorite things to do is to attend the Giving Pledge annual meeting. For me, it is time well used with high leverage, both for helping younger philanthropists find their way and also to learn things from this intelligent and experienced group. One of my favorite Giving Pledge moments happened when I realized that I was learning as much from other Giving Pledge members as I was expounding myself.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said the Skoll Foundation was established in 2011. It was established in 2003.
