Encore - Chuck Feeney: All duty

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Hi, I'm Simon Jack.

And I'm Zing Sing.

It's not long now until we'll be back with brand new episodes of Good, Bad, Billionaire.

Before that, as promised, we're bringing back one of our very favorite episodes of the podcast.

This is one of the stories we often refer back to.

It's one of the most unusual and surprising billionaire stories we've ever covered.

Yeah, I love this story.

It's an epic tale in many ways, and it's all about a man named Chuck Feeney.

Sadly, just a month after the podcast came out in September 2023, Chuck died.

But his story is one that's really worth listening to again.

There are lots of twists and turns, so do stay to the end.

This is the story of Chuck Feeney, a man who was quite literally all duty.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast from BBC Sounds where we unravel the story of how a billionaire got so rich.

And then we judge them.

Are they good?

Are they bad or just another billionaire?

I'm Zing Sing and I am a journalist, author and podcaster.

And I'm Simon Jack.

I'm the BBC's business editor.

And neither of us are billionaires.

Just to make it absolutely clear, but we are interested in billionaires.

Why do you find them fascinating, Simon?

Because money gets you power and that power is largely unaccountable and that's kind of an interesting position to be in.

Exactly.

But they could use their power for good, which is exactly what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

Okay, this week's billionaire is a guy called Charles Chuck Feeney, an Irish-American born in the 1930s.

Now, a lot of the billionaires we cover in this series are pretty well-known household names, but this one was completely unknown to me and one of the most fascinating stories of all the ones we've looked at.

Yeah, I have to say, I had never heard of Chuck Feeney either, but the more I read about him and the more I researched him, the more I kind of think he's one of the more fascinating characters on our list, right?

Definitely.

I mean, you won't know his name.

I didn't know his name, but you'll be very aware of the empire that he created.

Every time you come out of an airport and you see this glittering palace to consumerism, and you get bombarded by pictures of film stars and their perfume of choice, and whiskey offers and cigarettes.

Toblerones.

Toblerones.

What is it with Toblerones and duty free?

Anyway, that's what we're talking about.

Duty free.

He kind of is the godfather of duty-free shopping.

So to try and get to grips of who exactly Chuck Feeney is, we're going to throw some numbers at you.

So he made $8 billion,

but he also donated $8 billion.

Yeah, so he was described as the billionaire who wasn't.

As fast as he made money, he gave it away.

In fact, he gave away $1.5 billion

in donations to Ireland alone, to a single country.

Don't forget he's Irish-American, so that's a link.

Yeah, and basically helped build a thousand buildings across five continents.

And in 2023, when his remaining personal net worth is less than $2 million,

he's aiming for it to be zero by the time he dies.

I've got a feeling when we come to score him on philanthropy, it's going to be pretty high.

Even though he was a billionaire, he wears a $15 Casia watch and lives in a two-bed rental in San Francisco, a rental.

He doesn't even own a house.

And he said he'd quite as happily eat a cheese and tomato sandwich as dining in a fancy restaurant.

So among the pantheon of billionaires, he's kind of an oddball, to say the least.

Definitely an outlier and fascinating case.

So let's tell the story of how he went from a zero to a million, the Chuck Feeney story from childhood.

He's born during the Great Depression in 1931 into a very working-class Irish-American neighborhood where everyone seems like they helped each other out.

Yeah, his parents had this great work ethic, selflessness.

His mum would give people a ride when they needed and pretended that she was going that way anyway.

So an early influence that would be reflected in his later life.

And he kind of shows these glimmerings of youthful entrepreneurialism quite early on.

So he takes up selling Christmas cards and caddying at the golf club.

So like a lot of the other billionaires, you know, he's got an early interest in making money.

Yeah, we've seen that.

He also did snow shoveling in the winter.

So he would go and basically, I'm going to shove your snow, and then go and get the biggest guy in the class to help him shovel the snow.

He managed to attract other people to do the work for him.

So that's always quite an entrepreneurial trait.

Classic hustler.

So Chuck Feeney's childhood.

actually spans this really interesting point in time, right?

So he's born into the Great Depression.

Then afterwards, there's the New Deal, you know, there's World War II.

He basically has to live through all these tumultuous times.

What do you think that does to a person?

I think it means that you are

not particularly rooted anywhere because there's such flux.

the flow of history.

You can feel it going through his story.

There's the Great Depression, as you say, Franklin D.

Roosevelt's New Deal to try and sort that out.

You then go into the Second World War, what happens in Japan, what happens in the US.

He's basically a kind of, I don't know, like a forest gump of post-war America.

He really is.

And he even served in the US Air Force.

So it actually played a pretty big part in his life.

It brought him travel, it brought him education.

At 17, he joins up as a radio operator during the Korean War, and he ends up going to Cornell because he goes on a military scholarship.

That's right.

People who served in the war were eligible to basically continue their education and would get a grant to do it.

And he was smart enough to go to an Ivy League university, used his GI scholarship to do that.

And that propelled him into an entirely different life than the one he was used to from his Irish-American background.

And it sounds like even there, he was still displaying that real kind of hustler streak.

So he became known as the sandwich guy on campus because he realized there wasn't a McDonald's or an equivalent kind of place people could get late night food.

So he ended up setting up his own business to sell sandwiches to hungry freshmen.

So he's, you know, he's still continuing to illustrate a flair for making money.

Yeah, he's got that entrepreneurism.

And also, he, I think that thing about that in that war period, he's also quite an internationalist.

I mean, he used the scholarship money he had left and probably from his sandwich proceeds.

He left to do political science at the University of Grenoble in France.

So he's a jet setter, this guy.

And that's going to be absolutely pivotal as to how he makes his fortune and then gives it away.

And he's pretty cosmopolitan as well.

I mean, he learns French and later on we'll see he'll also learn Japanese.

Yeah, and Japan actually, for my money, the emergence of post-war Japan is probably the pivotal fact in this whole story.

But before we get there, he has to meet someone called Roger Miller in France who becomes his business partner.

And that's where they come up with the idea of selling duty-free items to US Navy personnel.

But before all that, I think we need an explanation of what exactly duty-free is because I'm so used to seeing it in airports that I've never really stopped to question myself on what that term even means.

It's a weird one because duty free

operates in this kind of weird zone, this nether world, which is sort of between countries where taxes of the country that the actual store is in.

or where you're going, you're not in either place really.

And therefore, consumption taxes, things like, you know, tobacco tax, VAT that we're very used to, all of those things that would apply in that country don't apply there because you're kind of between countries and not really in one at all.

Is that what an airport really is?

Considered, you know, a zone in between countries.

You're basically considered to be in transit, so you're kind of in outer space in a way.

You're basically not in one country and not in another, which means the taxes of the country you're going to don't apply, and the taxes the one you're leaving don't apply, which means that stuff is cheaper because those consumption taxes are not added to the cost of the item you're buying.

And most importantly, for Chuck Feeney's story, that same rule also applies to US Navy personnel, which is why he and Miller start this business selling duty-free items to them.

That's right.

So they were allowed, U.S.

service people serving abroad were allowed to bring a certain amount of booze, cigarettes, etc., back to the U.S.

without paying the taxes they would otherwise pay on it.

Having served in the Army himself, he knew the mind of the GI, the U.S.

service person, knew the kind of things that they wanted.

And also, in a post-war world, there were lots of U.S.

people living abroad, both in Japan, in Germany, and elsewhere.

So there was this kind of community of people coming in and out of countries.

So there's a lot of travel involved in that.

And that's where that kind of little gap in the market, the duty-free, when you're between countries, that's where it opened up.

And it's kind of crazy because, you know, At this period in Feeney's life, him and Miller are literally just talking their way onto military vessels, chatting up all these soldiers, kind of finding out what they want, what they could get for them, how much they could sell it for.

There's a real kind of catch-me-if-you-can vibe to this era in his life.

You can just kind of imagine himself being played by George Clooney or Leo DiCaprio, you know, this charming, fast-talking Irish-American young buck who goes around selling stuff.

Yeah.

Real salesman.

Yeah, like, yeah, you want this, I can get you this, I can get you that.

Da, da, da, we've got a great deal on this.

A very glamorous Arthur Daly, maybe, for British listeners.

But crucially at this point, they start expanding beyond just tobacco and alcohol and they expand into duty-free concessions.

And this is where we we see the real roots of DFS being planted, right?

They buy these concessions in Hong Kong and Honolulu, in Hawaii, and they turn them from just kind of market stores of counters held together with tape into actual shops and concept stores.

Yeah, and they started out with things like liquor, alcohol, but then they realized if we can do that cheaply, why don't we do perfume?

And anyway, if you look at the duty-free stores today, it's absolutely ranks of perfume.

So, those kind of luxury goods.

So, yes, by 1964, their company, which at that time was called Tourist International, is in 27 countries, had 200 employees.

So a pretty substantial business.

Yeah.

I mean, we're talking a multinational company at a time when the world is literally just opening up for international travel, which when you think about it, is pretty wild.

Yeah, but it wasn't plain sailing.

In fact, the wheels came off that business in quite a big way.

Yeah, in quite a literal way, actually.

They made what I would not describe as a canny detour into trying to sell cars to GIs.

Unfortunately, a car is not a bottle of whiskey and it's not a bottle of perfume and it's significantly harder to ship out and sell to people.

So that lost them quite a lot of money.

But after they sold off most of the assets to try and recoup their losses, they then decided to focus on what really matters to the story, which is duty-free, specifically the Honolulu concession.

So they focus on Honolulu, they get their act together and that starts to really make money.

And it is in this period, towards the end of the 1960s, we can say that Chuck Feeney gets towards his first million, our first stage of our story.

And it can't be overemphasized how important this tilt towards Honolulu was, right?

Because at the time, Japan was literally opening up.

So before the 60s, Japan was quite a closed-off country.

It's quite protectionist.

So you weren't actually even allowed to leave the country for leisure travel.

But it was around the time of the 64 Tokyo Olympics that the government started loosening the restrictions.

So for the first time, all these Japanese people with lots of savings were going out into the big wide world and were desperate to spend their money.

And Hawaii, which was actually relatively close to Japan, was one of the first places they alighted on.

One of the first ports of call for the Japanese tourists.

And as you say, post-war, Japan had not wanted Japanese people to take money out of the country.

As things opened up, what started as a trickle of Japanese tourism became a flood from the 1960s onwards.

And this is one of the questions we're always going to ask in this series.

Is it a question of being just in the right place at the right time and riding the right wave?

And this was a big one.

I think it's a mix of both to be honest because he did luck out with Japan opening up but at the same time he did do everything in his power to take advantage of it.

I mean he learned to speak Japanese.

That is no mean feat considering I mean he went to an Ivy League university but he didn't study languages and you hear tales of sales assistants saying that you know they would turn around and Chuck Feeney would suddenly be on the display for speaking in flawless Japanese to a Japanese tourist trying to flog them even more stuff.

You know, so the guy really was quite a savvy operator and he knew how important the market was was going to be.

So he hired the right people through the language and through affinity with that country, he managed to get the product offering right and knew exactly what his customers wanted.

So by the end of the 60s, Feeney and also Miller, don't forget, because he's in business with Miller, are millionaires.

From a pretty modest Irish-American background, he's now a globetrotting, pretty jet-set millionaire at a time when being a millionaire really meant something.

You see, this is what I mean about the whole George Clooney thing.

He speaks multiple languages.

He's this kind of charismatic, fast-talking guy.

I mean, where's the movie about Chuck Feeney?

Yeah, I kind of think of a person like Hans Solow or something in Star Wars.

He's sort of, you know, just on the border, slightly sailing pretty close to the wind on the rules, charming the locals, knowing where the business is being done, giving people the products and the services they want.

Quite a maverick sort of character.

And quite, you know, sounds pretty exciting, actually.

The 70s also brings about a new era for him to live through, which is the era of the jet age.

And not only the jet, the jumbo jet, which comes into service in the 70s, and at which point you're funneling many more people through international airports.

It was the glamorous jet age when international travel became fashionable, desirable,

and how you looked when you travel and what you bought was part of the whole deal.

Yeah, it brings to mind that madmen age of, you know, being able to light a cigarette on a plane and having a pretty air stewardess pour you a cocktail.

You know, that's the age that we're operating in.

Against that backdrop, duty-free shoppers is basically there as a kind of toll booth just taking a little bit of money every time someone goes through these airports.

Because people, I think, when they are traveling, get a different image of themselves.

And they're saying, I could, look at me.

I'm an international, particularly back in the 70s.

Look at me.

I'm an international traveler.

Maybe an international traveler like me should have some nice perfume or or maybe I should have a nice handbag or maybe I should have a cool pair of sunglasses.

You catch people at a time when they've got money in their pocket and are feeling adventurous.

Oh, it's that's a very good way of looking at it and especially if you're going somewhere you've never been to before right because when the Boeing 747 gets developed that changes everything so all of a sudden all these new places open up as potential stopovers and you know pit stops like Anchorage for instance which becomes quite an important DFS outpost nobody was going to Anchorage before until it became a place where the Boeing 747s could refuel and Chuck Feeney is right there opening up a concession store and the Japan thing is really important because during that period from the 70s into the 80s

Japan was buying up half of California.

Japanese investors were buying country clubs.

The success of the Japanese economy meant they had plenty of money.

The yen had strengthened in value on the basis of that.

So you got more dollars for your yen at that particular time.

So they were outbound, confident, well-heeled consumers.

And Chuck Feeney was right in the middle to take his slice.

And I think what's so interesting is that they were also creating new luxury brands as a result of what they were putting in DFS.

So I've always asked myself, you know, you walk through DFS and you look at Camu Cogniac.

Cogniac?

I have never drunk it in the middle of the day.

Cognac.

Cognac, yeah.

I had never heard of it until I saw it in DFS.

Similarly with something like Nina Richie.

Richie, I think.

Richie, yeah.

And apparently those brands were made by being in DFS because by putting them front and center, the Japanese tourists learned to associate them with Western luxury.

Yeah, when you had a country which basically had been devastated by the Second World War, had two atomic bombs dropped on it, let's not forget, the refinding of confidence and looking for international experiences all fed into that kind of...

perfect consumer storm which Chuck Tweeni was able to exploit.

And DFS rode the wave all the way to the end of the decade.

So at the end of the 70s, they have five to six thousand employees and they're taking in three billion dollars a year.

So on the one hand he's living high on the hog.

He says we drank a lot of champagne, we drank a lot of everything, we worked hard and we played hard, lavish parties.

But at the same time, he had a slightly different message to his own family.

He never lost those roots that he had.

No, he always told his children the importance of working hard.

His kids had summer jobs, you know, when they were on holiday from school.

You know, it seems like even though he traveled quite a long way financially from his roots as, you know, a young working-class Irish American, that kind of sense of humility never quite left him.

In fact, you could say he felt pretty uncomfortable almost.

There was a sort of disquiet in him about the fact that he just felt a bit funny about the wealth he was creating.

And that becomes a very big part of why we're even discussing this today.

I mean, yeah, because just as he's approaching the billionaire club, there's quite a pivotal moment in his life where his lawyer, Harvey Dale, introduces him to philanthropic literature.

Now, I had no idea philanthropy even had literature to speak of, but it became a pretty big deal to Feeney.

Yeah,

there was an essay by Andrew Carnegie, famous philanthropist, huge industrialist, an essay called Wealth, and a quote from a guy called the Reverend Frederick Gates, no relation to Bill Gates, as far as I know, but he said this to the world's first billionaire, John D.

Rockefeller.

Who knows, maybe we'll cover him at some point.

It says, Mr.

Rockefeller, your fortune is rolling up like an avalanche.

You must distribute it faster than it grows.

If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, pretty punchy words.

It kind of comes off more like a threat, to be honest.

Yeah, it's basically saying the God of Mammon money will eventually destroy you.

And anyway, he takes it to heart, right?

Yeah, he really does.

Because at 50, Chuck Feeney makes his first major philanthropic donation.

He gives 700,000 to his alma mater, the place that started him off on this journey, Cornell.

So that's in 1981.

So he's already starting to give away quite a lot of money.

But, you know, he got a taste for it.

So he set up this foundation called Atlantic Philanthropies.

$5 million of his own money.

And within two years, he'd given $15 million through that foundation.

But the really interesting thing about Atlantic is the absolute code of silence that he insists upon.

It's almost like a mafia-like Omerta.

If you receive a donation from Atlantic, you are not allowed to say where it comes from.

You are not allowed to breathe a word of his name.

There's an amazing story,

maybe an apocryphal story, where he turns up at an event and the photographer is given an empty camera without any filming.

So he thinks he's taking pictures of Chuck Feeney, but no pictures are ever developed because Chuck Feeney does not want to be associated with what he's giving away at all.

It's really odd that, isn't it?

Because most philanthropic benefactors quite like the name above the library, quite like the name on the hospital wing.

In America, it's a bit like their honors system.

You don't get made a sir or a lord in America, but you do get, if you're rich, you do get things named after you because you become a benefactor.

And, you know, that's kind of the expectation in the US.

Perfectly fine for you to get filthy rich, but you then have to start giving back.

But when you give back, you usually let everyone know that you're doing it.

And I think it's a really interesting mindset.

He said, if you reveal the source of these funds, you won't get any.

I mean, I've tried to puzzle out why he was so insistent on this kind of secrecy because it is quite unusual.

I mean, like you say, you walked up to any big museum or hospital or university in America, there is going to be someone who donated a huge chunk of money with a name on a building.

And I kind of feel like maybe something happened when he served in a military that it was impressed upon him the importance of secrecy and being discreet.

One theory I have is that the reason he didn't want to give too much away is that people would realize just how much money duty-free shoppers were actually making, and that would inspire jealousy and competition.

And actually, they were very handily off-radar because they're basically not really in any countries at all, they're kind of between the countries, and they were quite happy to make that money in secret because they didn't want anyone else to realize what a good thing they had going.

I also think part of it maybe is because he'd seen rich people throw their cash around and been targeted for things like their children got kidnapped, they were extorted.

Exactly.

This is a time of Patty Hearst.

He had kids that he absolutely adored, and he would not have wanted any of them to go through what she went through.

So maybe there was a bit of that, a little bit of self-protection as well.

Well, maybe it's like his mum pretended that she was going the way when she gave lifts to people, said she was going that way anyway.

Maybe it's because if you want recognition, it's kind of doing the right thing for the wrong reason.

That is a good theory.

And so, listen, he's making tons of money.

He's secretly giving some of it away.

In the mid-80s, his wealth was estimated around then to be close to a billion dollars but just as he reached the moment that allows him inclusion into this whole program series there was a pivotal moment he signs away his fortune to that foundation atlantic and that also includes a 38.5 percent stake in duty-free shoppers and that is incredible i mean let's put that into perspective he's basically signed away all his wealth But he did keep some back for his wife and children and a little bit for himself, but as pocket money.

A paltry 40 million to his wife and kids.

And kept 5 million bucks for himself.

You know, which obviously is a lot of money, but compared to a billion.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, I saw a documentary about this, and I saw some of his family members introduced.

It's like, you did what?

They sort of went, okay.

Because his lawyer said to him, he said, are you sure you want to do this?

Because once you sign what they call an irrevocable trust, it means exactly that, you can't change your mind.

If you're signing that money away, it's gone.

So he goes off to Bermuda, a place where lots of international trusts are established, mainly because there's no tax there and it has very favourable tax treatment, which is another interesting thing that although he's a massive philanthropist, as we'll see as we go forward, he doesn't like the idea of paying tax too much, either for his customers in duty-free or indeed himself, because he organises a lot of his affairs offshore where the tax authorities can't get to him.

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So it's the late 80s.

DFS is now the largest seller of liquor, that's hard liquor, doesn't include beer and wine, in the world.

He's selling $250 million worth a year.

And in 1988, he was named by Forbes magazine as the 23rd richest American alive.

And they say he's got a fortune of $1.3 billion.

But little do they know, he's actually signed most of it away.

Yeah, so he was the billionaire, as someone said, that wasn't.

So everyone thought he was a billionaire, but in fact, he'd given it away.

How do you stay quiet in a situation like that?

I don't know.

I think one of the things he got called was what, the James Bond of philanthropy.

So utterly secret, so discreet.

I mean, yeah, it's kind of a miracle he got away with it for so long.

Yeah, I mean, although we all know about it now, though, don't we?

So in the end, we did.

In the end, we found out.

I mean, I just wonder whether he could have gone to his grave not telling you.

I actually think he would have preferred that.

I feel like, you know, reading about the kind of person he was, he would have gotten a real kick out of it.

And it's interesting

because the usual way that wealth is redistributed is through the tax system.

So the rich people pay a bit more and it gets dished out to poor people who need it more.

But he basically hated that that idea, thought the government was not the right mechanism to do it and thought that business people, particularly one with his eye and his instincts, would be much more effective at helping people than any government could be.

I could sort of see his point and sort of not.

I mean, you're placing an awful lot of importance on a single person at the top of the pyramid to figure out where the right place where the money is.

And that person might have no idea about anything to do with politics or government or, you know, where local councils need the money.

And that's where government should kind of step in surely.

Yeah, governments who are accountable

to raise that accountability point, a billionaire who decides to dish out money left, right and centre, they've obviously made lots of money from a system which they have prospered from and maybe they should pay back into that system and let the electorate decide how the spoils of wealth are divided rather than the whim of an individual.

And Chuck Feeney had quite a lot of whims, right?

I mean, he donated across a huge range of causes.

He starts in a way back where we started our story in the Irish community.

And in particular, he was a massive benefactor in Ireland.

So he started out by focusing on higher education because for Chuck Feeney, his experience at Cornell really gave him the kind of you know, the chops and the education, the leg up that he really needed at the time.

So he focuses on higher education in Ireland.

He donates tens of millions to universities across Ireland, always telling them that they are not allowed to say that this is where the money came from.

Yeah, and the Irish community in the US was actually quite a powerful political force within Ireland and also had a big role to play during the Troubles and then the end of the troubles with the Good Friday Agreement.

And in fact, in 1993,

he was asked to join the Irish American group to go to Ireland to talk to the IRA about a ceasefire.

To put it into context, so he's a philanthropist and, you know, ex-billionaire who was involved in university education and helping to support university education in Ireland.

And here he is getting involved in proper politics now.

This is big stuff because he actually agreed to fund Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA at that time, to fund them to open a Washington office after an IRA ceasefire in 1994.

He paid a million dollars.

That came out of his own pocket, by the way, not out of the actual philanthropic trust, because he said that that wasn't what the philanthropic Atlantic philanthropist was meant to do but that was a pretty bold thing to do and will have raised massive eyebrows certainly in the uk oh yeah and you know he even got involved in cuba he started getting involved in supporting medical causes in cuba at a time when most people in america would have not gone anywhere near it it even meant that he ended up meeting fidel castro which is pretty crazy and also of having a he went met jerry adams the head of sinn fan and then in a way became an emissary of sorts back to bill clinton in the white house And so, actually, you could argue, had quite a fundamental effect on one of the great political shifts in the 1990s, which ultimately culminated in the Good Friday Agreement.

But it wasn't without controversy.

Meeting Jerry Adams, funding Sinn Féin, that was very controversial.

So, 1996 is a huge year for Chuck Feeney because this is when he decides he wants to sell the DFS stake to LVMH.

LVMH, Louis Vuitton, Moet Hennessy, controlled by Bernard Arnault, who you may remember came up in our episode about Rihanna, joint business partner with her.

Yeah, he wants to sell up and at this point this is where the big reveal comes because it's such a substantial stake in the company that he owns through this foundation that they have to disclose who owns this stake.

And at that point, if you like, the mask of secrecy has to go because they've got to file the paperwork.

And it also means that he loses Miller because Miller does not want to sell up.

His old business partner he's been in business with for years.

Miller doesn't want to sell, but he forces it through anyway.

And that, by the look of it, is the end of their relationship.

Yeah, so the New York Times runs a blockbuster interview with Feeney where he basically comes out and says, I've been the secret philanthropist for years and years, and I'm not even a billionaire anymore.

And it's a big shock to the world.

And yes, and in fact,

they figure that

if his foundation had been in the US, it would have been America's fourth largest philanthropic institution if it were based in the US.

So the charity is now out in the open.

And this also means that Feeney's personal wealth is disclosed as less than $2 million.

He's given away $610 million and is set to give away the rest.

So the billionaire who isn't, his anonymity is gone.

So how does he react to that?

He actually speeds up the process of giving away even more of his money.

And he's still living in rented accommodation with a $15 watch, having given away by the end of this process, he's made $8 billion and given pretty much all of that away and one thing i do love about him is that up until his 80s when he had to stop for health reasons because his children begged him to he insisted on flying economy class did he i mean i would give myself that one concession wouldn't you i really really would especially given the fact he spent his entire life in airports i mean you have to give it to him the man is consistent if nothing else yeah so bring us up to date it's 2023 chuck is now how old he's 92 years old and he lives in a rented apartment with his second wife, Helga.

And he's named by Forbes, not in the billionaire category anymore, but in America's top 25 philanthropists.

With a personal wealth of less than $2 million, which makes him the poorest philanthropist on the list by far.

Yeah, and other billionaires really take their hat off to him.

Warren Buffett, who is also lives very modestly for someone who's worth tens of billions of dollars, he said, Chuck set an example.

He's my hero.

And Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft's hero, he should be everybody's hero.

I mean, I have to take my hat off to Feeney because he does honestly sound like one of the humblest rich people I've ever read about.

Yeah, because there are people who give money away, but they tend to do it in quite a grandiose way.

Having seen him in interview, he is a very sharp but mild-mannered, reserved person.

And one of the things that I find really touching about said, Why did you do this?

Is you're never going to run out of people who need help, which I thought was pretty cool.

Yeah, I mean, even when you read about what it was like to work with him, I think one staffer at Atlantic said that he never used to demand that people run errands for him.

So, if you're at the head of a company, you could basically snap your fingers and say, Hey, man, go pick up some lunch for me, get my dry cleaning.

Chuck would never do that.

And in fact, they used to see him pick rubbish up off the street because his mentality was: if everyone did it, there wouldn't be any trash left on the street.

That's amazing.

I mean, that's almost to a point where it's kind of a personality disorder.

What a remarkable story and a remarkable man.

So now comes the point when we have to judge him by our criteria.

So just remind us how this works again.

So we're going to rank Chuck Feeney from zero to a ten on different billionaire metrics.

So let's go through our categories.

Wealth.

In the pantheum of billionaires, where does he sit?

I mean zero because he's not a billionaire anymore.

If he ever was, because I think actually he started giving away the money before he even hit the billion dollars.

So you could argue that he's got no place on this program because he never even had a billion dollars to his name.

Well, but people crucially thought he did.

Yeah, crucially they did.

So we're going to give him on wealth, weirdly, for good, bad, billionaire.

Gonna give him a zero?

Yeah, I would give him a zero.

Sorry, Chuck.

Zero.

It's what he would have wanted.

Rags to riches.

Let's assume for the purposes of this category that he is rich, even though he's not really.

He has traveled pretty far from his Irish-American

born in the Great Depression roots.

I mean, it's almost like a Scorsese story, isn't it?

I would feel like a Scorsese story.

I would give him a 10, to be honest, because that narrative of, you know, being that plucky young kid from a hard-up neighborhood, all the way to being the cosmopolitan jet-set entrepreneur to being the philanthropist who lives in secret.

I mean, that's a 10 for me.

Against the background of war, New Deal, the jumbo jet age, the opening up of japan i mean you you the film kind of like you can see it yeah it writes itself i would give it a 10.

villainy

this is where we ask are they a bit of a kind of james bond villain have they done people over to get to the top

i mean i honestly would give this guy a zero too i don't i mean sure he probably

operated quite close to the wind on quite a lot of tax related matters and definitely when dfs first set up he took advantage of a lot of the cracks in the system to put it mildly I mean, you could argue, you know, he had his faults.

For instance, the whole business he built is based on avoiding sales tax, and the philanthropic ventures he kind of embarked on were based on this attitude that he kind of knew better than governments.

Yeah, he hates taxes.

He hates his customers paying them.

He hates paying them himself.

He hates jurisdictions where they're levied, so he goes to other places.

It's a very interesting mindset that he clearly thinks, as a lot of libertarians do, the architecture of government is wasteful and it makes poor decisions and that you could argue is a an arrogant position to take but when it comes to reading about how he worked with people people at dfs seem to genuinely love him like in a way that you do not get with a lot of bosses like people sang his praises so i'd give him a zero yeah i think that for any sharp practice that was probably inevitably involved in his making the money was more than atoned for by the way he gave it away because i can imagine him being quite a slick operator, you know, in the post-war kind of situation.

But he's absolved himself with his philanthropy.

Oh, 100%.

Which brings us on to the next category where surely philanthropy is a category, this is a big fat tale, isn't it?

I mean, this is a 10 out of 10 for me.

An 11 out of 10.

To give an 11 would be the spinal tap of philanthropy.

It goes up to 11.

This one goes up to 11.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And power.

Power.

Now, this is an interesting one because a secret billionaire who gives away his money without telling anyone, you wouldn't think had much power.

But we saw with his influence in the Northern Ireland peace process, actually, he had a lot of clout.

Right, and you know, he's an example of how you can use money as a force for good, you know, whether or not it bypasses government taxation or whatever.

He actually channeled it towards a lot of really charitable causes.

He changed a lot of people's lives.

Yeah, he

famously said that he thought that Ireland was falling behind and didn't have the educational opportunities for for the people of that nation that they deserved.

And he totally changed that.

He gave money to 10 universities.

You look at the Irish economy now, it is a knowledge-skills-based, it was the Celtic tiger, if you remember, was the way they used to describe it.

That in no small part was down to the probably Chuck Feeney and his investment in the university system there.

And he didn't just do things for Ireland.

You know, he also went to places like Vietnam, Australia, South Africa, and basically plunged loads of money into their education systems as well to try try and bring them up to speed.

So, you know, when you have the kind of power and influence that means you can single-handedly, with your money, change the course of an entire country's path, I mean, that's a 10, surely, for power as a powerful guy.

Yeah, it's not how we would traditionally think of power, perhaps, but I think it's a, yeah, let's get, I'm going to give him a nine.

Okay, what about legacy?

How have they changed the course of history?

Well,

maybe he has set a benchmark for philanthropy that other people will judge themselves by.

And it may well be the benchmark that we judge all of the people in this series by.

Any self-respecting billionaire would find it pretty hard to compare themselves to this guy.

That's an enormous legacy.

It's enough to make you want to be rich.

Yes, that is the only reason I would want to be rich.

Yeah, okay.

10 for me.

We're giving out a lot of tens here.

I feel like

he is the exemplar.

He's the benchmark, I think, because he's so unusual.

We've gone like to the last episode of Strictly Come Dancing too quickly here.

It's all four tens.

It's tens across the board.

I'm Giovanni.

Yes, exactly.

So I don't think he's changed the world as much as, say, for example,

Bill Gates has changed the way computing and how we work or how Jeff Bezos has changed the way we shop and interact with the internet.

But it's a formidable philanthropic.

He's not your average billionaire.

So I'm going to give him an eight.

but in my heart it's a 10.

Okay, I'm going to meet you in the middle and give him a nine.

Okay.

So, good, bad, or just plain rich?

An unmitigated good.

Unmitigated.

Little tiny bit.

Okay, a tiny bit of mitigation, but still good.

I think that anyone who gives away $8 billion has got to get a bit of a tick and a round of applause, haven't they?

Well done, Chuck Feeney.

What a great story.

Thanks for listening.

If you want to know more about Chuck, I'd recommend his biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn't, How Chuck Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Connor O'Clary.

And if you want to hear more episodes of Good, Bad, the Billionaire, make sure you're subscribed in time for our new season starting on March the 17th.

And keep an eye on the feed before that for some exciting news about some of the billionaires we have coming up this year.

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