Friday, 22 May 2009 Oprah Winfrey took up the invitation to attend the Philanthropists Summit There are the great, and there are the good,
and then there are those who are both &ndash and in a plush Manhattan residence overlooking the East River earlier this month, America’s greatest philanthropists assembled for a closed-doors meeting to discuss how best to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems, from disease to education to poverty reduction. This first Philanthropists Summit was put together discreetly by the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, and the investment guru Warren Buffett, the world’s wealthiest and second-wealthiest men respectively. And the list of attendees reads like a page from the Forbes magazine Rich List. Even the existence of the meeting was kept quiet and details have only been seeping out over the past few days, igniting the blogosphere with conspiracy theories. What could the likes of Oprah Winfrey, the New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the currency speculator George Soros and the media mogul Ted Turner be cooking up between them The meeting was held on 5 May at the private residence of the president of Rockefeller University, whose trustee, David Rockefeller, scion of the oil dynasty, helped sort out the venue. Between them, the attendees are worth more than $120bn (&pound76bn) and have donated more than $72bn to charity since 1996.
Mr Gates heads the world’s richest and most powerful philanthropic foundation, named after himself and his wife, Melinda. In 2006, his friend and bridge partner Mr Buffett said he would hand most of his own fortune to the Gates Foundation to give away. Additional collaborations such as this were most likely on the informal agenda at the 5 May meeting, along with ways to encourage other members of the elite billionaires club to join the great global wealth giveaway.