Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong says philanthropy is ‘net negative’ on world

Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase chief executive whose fortune Bloomberg has tracked around $9 billion this year, has said he will not establish a charitable foundation, arguing that much of organised philanthropy does more harm than good.

“A lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world,” Armstrong said on the Katie Miller Podcast, describing his position as “a contrarian view.” He added: “They get captured. It’s actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology.”

Armstrong said advisers pressed him to set one up after Coinbase went public. “You get all these financial advisors around you and they’re often, for various tax reasons, are like ‘OK, we should set up this foundation for you.’ And so far, I’ve just been like ‘no, I’m not going to do that,’ because my fear is it just gets captured by some ideology that I lose control of it.” He cited the Ford Foundation, saying he believed Henry Ford “would be turning over in his grave if he knew what they were up to.”

This is a refusal to build an institution, not a refusal to give. Armstrong said he uses a donor advised fund for causes he considers advance civilisation, and added that he would never say never on a foundation. Coinbase is sponsoring the annual championship of the mobile game The Battle for Polytopia, where tournament purses had been as low as €25; the prize pool now appears to be $10,000.

Armstrong questioned the motives behind large-scale giving, naming Bill Gates directly: “Bill Gates after the DOJ thing is like, ‘I’m going to go rehabilitate my image, I’m going to do philanthropy.'”

That is Armstrong’s characterisation of Gates’s reasoning, not an established account. Gates has not responded, and the Microsoft antitrust case Armstrong alludes to was filed in 1998 and settled in 2001.

It matters beyond the personalities. The Gates Foundation is among the largest private funders of health programmes across Africa, and Gates pledged last year to direct most of a roughly $200 billion commitment toward the continent. Aliko Dangote has separately committed to giving away about a third of his fortune, some $11.6 billion.