It must be real­ly annoy­ing to be so rich that bleed­ing hearts are always bang­ing on about how you could sin­gle-hand­ed­ly solve world pover­ty or what­ev­er. So, here’s a sug­ges­tion to ease the pain for the world’s lead­ing mul­ti-bil­lion­aires: try cash­ing in on the wis­dom of Ben­jamin Franklin: “It is prodi­gious the quan­ti­ty of good that may be done by one man, if he will make a busi­ness of it.”

The busi­ness of aid agen­cies like the World Food Pro­gramme (WFP) is feed­ing the hun­gry, aid­ing devel­op­ment, and cri­sis man­age­ment. They arguably do it bet­ter than any­one. What they do less well is the busi­ness of rais­ing mon­ey to keep them in business.
In spite of hav­ing raised — entire­ly by vol­un­tary dona­tions — a record US$ 9.6 bil­lion in 2021, WFP is $5.2 bil­lion short of requirements.
Jeff Bezos, Richard Bran­son and Elon Musk, the mul­ti-bil­lion­aires com­pet­ing to fly in space (to lump them in cor­po­rate par­lance — B, B & M), right­ly pride them­selves as being good at the busi­ness of mak­ing mon­ey because they are innovators.
A “merg­er” of their inno­v­a­tive busi­ness acu­men and the exper­tise of aid agen­cies seems to me to be a win-win.

                                HOW DEEP IS YOUR NEED?

The WFP has worked out that if B, B & M com­mit­ted $6 bil­lion, they could keep 41 mil­lion peo­ple from starv­ing this year.

To put that in per­spec­tive, the $5.5 bil­lion it cost Bezos for the Blue Ori­gin flight that he said gave him his “best day ever” (four min­utes of being weight­less), could have saved 37.5 mil­lion peo­ple who are get­ting more weight­less by the day, and not hav­ing any fun doing it.
But let us not be too judge­men­tal. It’s his mon­ey, and many of us spend mon­ey that could be giv­en to a good cause on a hol­i­day, for example.
And any­one who’s giv­en a “one time dona­tion” for a good cause knows the fol­low-ons end up being as annoy­ing as tele­mar­keters. There’s no rea­son to think being mega-rich would spare you that. Prob­a­bly quite the contrary.
That’s where the ben­e­fits of a merg­er come in. Instead of hand­ing over buck­ets of cash and then being bugged to do it over and over again, B, B & M (and any of their fel­low Croe­sus-like con­tem­po­raries who might be inter­est­ed) could try a new kind of inno­va­tion, an invest­ment port­fo­lio whose stake­hold­ers are aid agen­cies with a proven track record and prop­er­ly audit­ed account­ing practices.
True, it would be sub­ject to mar­ket forces and the ups and downs that entails. The dif­fer­ence is that the mon­ey it earned would be used to keep peo­ple pro­duc­tive, which con­tributes to the over­all well-being not just of the indi­vid­u­als, but in the long-run, economies, and there­fore the com­pa­nies that make up a portfolio.
For exam­ple: the Inter­na­tion­al Fund for Agri­cul­tur­al Devel­op­ment works with rur­al com­mu­ni­ties to increase crop yields, devel­op entre­pre­neur­ial oppor­tu­ni­ties, adapt to cli­mate change, and empow­er young peo­ple and women. The organ­i­sa­tion is cur­rent­ly $350 mil­lion short of its next fundrais­ing goal. (That’s the cost of the first 30 sec­onds of Jeff Bezos’ sub­or­bital flight.)

                         HOW HIGH CAN YOU COUNT?

Elon Musk could offer the fund free exper­tise on avoid­ing tax­es, too. Accord­ing to a recent piece in the New York Times: “He has railed against fed­er­al sub­si­dies but his com­pa­nies have ben­e­fit­ed from bil­lions of dol­lars in tax breaks and oth­er incen­tives from fed­er­al, state and local governments.”
Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Musk, the rich­est man in the world at an esti­mat­ed $249-bil­lion, is set to col­lect a $23-bil­lion bonus after Tes­la report­ed record quar­ter­ly profits.

Puts a whole new spin on “Broth­er, can you spare a dime”, the Anthem of the Great Depres­sion made famous by Bing Cros­by and oth­ers, does it not?
When Lau­rence Tisch, a bil­lion­aire who bought CBS and set about try­ing to turn “the Tiffany net­work” into a cos­tume jew­el­ry out­let by asset-strip­ping it for cash, I asked the late, great Ed Bradley, who knew Tisch, why peo­ple who had more mon­ey than they could spend, want­ed even more. Ed laughed and said; “So they can count it.”
Putting a few buck­ets of cash where it might make prof­it to put to much need­ed use would, if noth­ing else, make it (mar­gin­al­ly) eas­i­er for B, B & M to count the rest.
And if that’s not incen­tive enough, they might also bear in mind a Per­sian proverb:“Every man goes down to his death bear­ing in his hands only that which he has giv­en away.”
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