The business of giving | Economist.com

The business of giving | Economist.com: "GIVING away money has never been so fashionable among the rich and famous. Bill Gates, today's pre-eminent philanthropist, has already handed over an unprecedented $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, mostly to tackle the health problems of the world's poor. Its generosity has earned the couple Time magazine's nomination as 2005's “people of the year”, along with Bono, an activist rock star.

The next generation of technology leaders are already embracing the same ethos. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and Jeff Skoll, the auction site's first chief executive, are each putting their billions to work to “make the world a better place”. And when the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, took their company public, they announced that a slice of the search engine's equity and profits would go to Google.org, a philanthropic arm that they hope will one day “eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems”." (subscription required)