Simon Cowell and Family

Source: Bigstock

Earlier this month, Simon Cowell—who has already done enough damage by unleashing One Direction on an unsuspecting planet—announced that none of his estimated $600 million will go to his son. Not a penny, not a farthing, not even the loose change rattling around the glove compartment of his Bentley. “I don’t believe in passing down from generation to generation,” he declared, a bold philosophical stance from a fellow who grew up amid the leafy comforts of Hertfordshire and parlayed inherited showbiz connections into global dominion. Instead, Cowell intends to scatter part of his fortune across the ever-swelling ranks of dog rescue charities—the great moral fashion of our age, in which well-heeled Westerners airlift half-blind Romanian street mutts, Port-au-Prince alley curs, and whatever limping quadruped can be rescued from Kim Jong Un’s kitchen. It’s Operation Babylift, except the evacuees have mange. One presumes the dogs are delighted. The child, perhaps less so. Cowell reassured the lad that “college will be paid for…and then you must start,” which is the sort of thing very rich people say when they’ve forgotten how they themselves started—namely, several rungs up the ladder they are now theatrically kicking away.

Leading this stampede of moral exhibitionism is Bill Gates, high priest of the Giving Pledge, who has long promised that his children will inherit little more than the satisfaction of being related to the man who accidentally helped create vaccine-derived polio in half of Africa. The real inheritance goes to NGOs, U.N. agencies, and transnational bodies so large and unaccountable you need a PhD in global health metrics just to find out who stole the money this time.

But Gates is merely the opening act. Warren Buffett, great Midwestern apostle of frugality, has pledged away his fortune to bankroll Gates’ global salad bar of initiatives, including gender-equity agriculture, mosquito-monitoring drones, and something called “climate-resilient sorghum”—all while his own grandchildren inherit nothing but a vague sense that Grandpa preferred African millet to them. Mark Zuckerberg created a “charitable LLC,” a structure unique in its ability to call itself philanthropy while behaving exactly like a private investment firm, and now funds everything from “personalized learning platforms” (huh?) to biomedical moon shots promising to “cure all disease,” a goal so grandiose it makes L. Ron Hubbard look modest. Pierre Omidyar does the same on a global scale, emptying his vaults into journalism labs, disinformation task forces, and racial-equity incubators—institutions designed to ensure no one anywhere expresses an unapproved thought without a trained NGO minder standing by.

This isn’t charity in the Carnegie sense; it’s performative sanctimony for the global ruling class—a priesthood of billionaire ascetics renouncing their heirs while buying moral indulgences at scale.

Let me be clear: I don’t lose sleep over the comfort of Cowell’s or Gates’ progeny. They’ll muddle through on their private tutors, crisp vowels, and blue-chip connections. What keeps me up is the moral theology behind this new fashion for disinheriting one’s own children—this cult in which siphoning a family fortune into the maw of institutional philanthropy is treated as superior virtue. We are invited to applaud men dismantling their own dynasties, as though abandoning your lineage were moral enlightenment rather than what it is: a deeply anti-civilizational gesture, a kind of spiritual vandalism performed with a tax deduction.

For thousands of years, civilization endured because old men planted trees in whose shade they would never sit—and because they expected their grandchildren to sit there instead of loitering in a gender-activism pop-up. They built houses, not tents; dynasties, not hashtags; worlds meant to last longer than a weekend mindfulness retreat. Now the orchard is given away, the ancestral land sold to fund a Mediterranean cruise with complimentary chakra realignment, and whatever remains is donated to organizations that regard their children—and by extension their civilization—with ideological contempt. It’s what any honest anthropologist would recognize as an intergenerational death cult, albeit one with better PR.

And the charities themselves? Put a trust fund in their hands and they’ll chop down the donated trees to hire a new DEI commissar, import more Gambians and Haitians to socially reengineer Ohio, or fly a conference speaker by private jet to Davos to explain why your children should eat bugs.

These NGOs aren’t charities in any historic sense. They’re extraction machines—ideological strip miners flying the banner of mercy. Their business model is perpetual crisis; their product is moral blackmail. They aren’t designed for the long term, or even the short. They exist to keep the game going—for the people running the game.

Once upon a time, philanthropy had a different sound to it. Andrew Carnegie built libraries for American workers because he thought healthy republics required literate citizens. The Rockefellers funded universities and wiped out hookworm in the American South. Cecil Rhodes—Victorian imperialist, undergraduate bogeyman, and bronze likeness now toppled twice daily for therapeutic purposes—nevertheless understood something today’s billionaire philanthropists do not: that charity begins at home, or at least within the civilizational orbit one hopes to sustain. His Rhodes Scholarships were not diversity fellowships; they were a blueprint for a ruling class. Rhodes explicitly ranked his criteria: first, serious scholarly and literary attainment; second, the ability to actually use one’s talents—best demonstrated by success in “manly outdoor sports,” the rugby pitch being, in his view, a crash course in leadership.

Today’s philanthropists, by contrast, behave like spiritual expats. Their money doesn’t flow into the decaying mill towns of Ohio or the trailer parks of Appalachia. No—the default setting is “Save Africa,” a kind of philanthropic neocolonialism without the trains, roads, or functioning institutions empire used to leave behind. And astonishingly, only 10 to 20 percent of these mega-pledges ever reach frontline recipients; the rest are swallowed by the global do-gooder cartel—a network of NGOs, consultancy firms, and expatriate salaries that make the Pentagon look thrifty.

At least the old philanthropic titans were answerable to American or British public opinion. Today’s billionaire-humanitarians operate in a sovereignty-free zone. The Gates Foundation wields more power over global health than most governments, yet answers to no electorate. When oral polio vaccines funded by Gates sparked outbreaks of vaccine-derived polio from the Congo to Afghanistan, there were no hearings, no inquiries—just a quiet pivot and another triumphant conference circuit.

And here’s the darkest irony: While Cowell, Gates, and their peers proudly disinherit their own children “for the greater good,” the only kids who lose out are the ones in their own countries. Their heirs still inherit elite networks, elite schools, and elite passports. Meanwhile, the working-class children they overlook are left to rot in a rigged economy, their towns hollowed out, their futures outsourced, their civic institutions replaced by glossy NGO logos that might as well read: “Your Betters Are Saving Someone Else Today.”

The old philanthropists understood this. Carnegie exploited American laborers, then educated their children. Gates monopolized software, then used the profits to run medical experiments on someone else’s children entirely.

But lost amidst all the celebrity posturing and billionaire redemption arcs is the simple truth: Civilization is not built on charitable write-offs. It is built on multigenerational stewardship.

Charity is lovely. Civilization is better. And civilization, unlike the Giving Pledge, requires heirs. When a civilization stops passing the torch, the fire goes out.

After all, if you won’t leave anything to your children—your money, your property, your culture, your nation—don’t be surprised when they inherit nothing at all.

Not even the civilization you took for granted.