Outdoor clothing company Patagonia’s billionaire founder has declared earth would be the sole shareholder of his US$3 billion company, effective immediately.
“If we have any hope of a thriving planet — much less a thriving business — 50 years from now, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have,” Yvon Chouinard said.
Is this the start of a trend? Chouinard, who founded the company off the back of his love of rock climbing, is known for being an unconventional billionaire. His move, which will channel an estimated US$100 million a year into climate causes, is in a different league from recent action by Australian billionaires Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes.
“Twiggy Forrest, Mike Cannon-Brookes and a bunch of others have made some amazing investments in renewables and some of them are going to change the face of renewable energy, but that’s an investment strategy, that’s not a philanthropic strategy,” philanthropist and co-founder of venture capital firm AirTree Daniel Petre tells Crikey.
“All that shows is that they have a very good sense of where energy production will come from in the future.”
In 2020, Forrest, a mining magnate with a newfound climate conscience, established Fortescue Future Industries to clean up parent company Fortescue Metals and kickstart (to the tune of billions of dollars) a slew of green hydrogen projects.
Last year tech tycoon Cannon-Brookes committed $1.5 billion from his kitty to climate projects. He also played ball with energy giant AGL, attempting to buy the company and halt a break-up designed to stall emissions reductions.
So is the Patagonia approach likely to catch on? Sadly not, Petre says.
“You’ve got people with billions of dollars in excess of what they need to live whatever lifestyle they want, and they still don’t feel motivated to give. Australia’s top givers have allocated less than 3% of their wealth to philanthropy,” he says.
“Surely you can do 20% or 30%. If you had $20 billion, give 20% away and you’re left with $16 billion. I think you’d be OK.”
The propensity to give is still subpar but certainly on the move. Petre puts that down to the changing face of billionaires from “old rich white guys” to the more “socially responsible” who’ve made money in tech and innovation.
“They don’t believe they deserve their wealth and there’s a general sense of discomfort with inequality,” he says. “That’s a huge difference between them and the old white guys.”
Chouinard, a white-haired 83-year-old, put it like this on Wednesday: “Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.”
