Positivity: The Secret Billionaire Giveaway
The not-secret-any-more philanthropist is Chuck Feeney:
Fri Sep 21, 2007 11:27am EDT
LONDON (Reuters) - He wears a $15 watch, flies economy class and does not own a house or car. For years few guessed that Chuck Feeney was one of the world’s biggest philanthropists, secretly giving away his billionaire fortune.
Born in New Jersey during the Depression to a blue-collar Irish-American family, Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), the world’s largest duty-free retail chain. He liked making money but not having it, and gave it away for years in strict secrecy.
Journalist Conor O’Clery’s new book “The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune” (Public Affairs $26.95), reveals that Feeney may be destined to go down in history as one of the greatest American philanthropists.
Witty, self-deprecating, frugal and astute, Feeney was listed by Forbes Magazine in 1988 as the 23rd richest American alive and worth $1.3 billion, richer than Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump. He wasn’t.
Four years earlier, Feeney had placed most of his money in charitable foundations.
Inspired by the great 19th century philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Feeney helped fund schools, hospitals, universities, medical research and human rights from the United States and Ireland to South Africa and Vietnam.
“I had one idea that never changed in my mind — that you should use your wealth to help people. I try to live a normal life, the way I grew up,” Feeney said. “I set out to work hard, not to get rich.”
Feeney made money in his youth selling Christmas cards door-to-door, clearing snow from driveways and caddying at golf courses. He loved the challenge of making money but had little use for it.
After serving as a U.S. Air Force radio operator in Japan during the Korean war, he graduated from Cornell University and launched his career selling duty-free liquor to American sailors at Mediterranean ports in the 1950s.
The business expanded rapidly to embrace airport duty free concessions. By the late 1960s business was booming thanks to sales of duty free from Anchorage to Hong Kong. Over the decades his fortune mushroomed and so did his determination to give it away. …..
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