What billionaires and their advisers say keeps them from giving more and faster

Marie Dageville and her husband Benoit Dageville became billionaires overnight when his data cloud company, Snowflake, went public in September 2020. After that life changing moment, Marie, a former hospice nurse, then set out to learn how to urgently give away that new fortune.

“We need to redistribute what we have that is too much,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press from her home in Silicon Valley.

While many say giving away a lot of money is hard, that is not Dageville’s perspective. Her advice is to just get started.

America's wealthiest people have urged each other to give away more of their money since at least 1889, the year Andrew Carnegie published an essay entitled, “The Gospel of Wealth." He argued that the richest should give away their fortunes within their lifetimes, in part to lessen the sting of growing inequality.