Chuck Feeney

Charles Feeney was born in 1931 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Irish-American parents during the Depression. He sold Christmas cards door to door, caddied and shovelled snow, served in the air force during the Korean War, and used the GI Bill to study hotel management at Cornell, where he sold sandwiches to students at night.

In the 1950s he and a Cornell classmate, Robert Miller, sold duty-free liquor to American sailors in Mediterranean ports, then cars, then anything. In 1960 they founded Duty Free Shoppers, gambling on the airports of Hong Kong and Honolulu and on Japanese tourists who had just been allowed to travel abroad. The business became enormous and made both men billionaires.

Feeney found the money embarrassing. In 1982 he set up the Atlantic Philanthropies and in 1984 signed over his whole stake, without telling his partners, his staff or most of his family. The foundation gave anonymously; grantees were told only that a donor wished no credit. He flew economy, wore a cheap plastic watch, did not own a house or a car, and carried his papers in a plastic bag. The secret came out in 1997, in the course of a legal dispute over the sale of the company to LVMH.

He had by then decided that giving while alive was more useful than giving in a will, and set the foundation a deadline. Universities in Ireland, Australia, Vietnam and the United States, hospitals, research and peace work in Northern Ireland received about eight billion dollars. The foundation closed in 2020 with the job done. He died in San Francisco in 2023, aged 92.