Charles Francis Feeney is an Irish-American businessman and philanthropist. He made his fortune as a co-founder of the Duty Free Shoppers Group. He gave away his fortune in secret for many years, until a business dispute resulted in his identity being revealed in 1997. He has given away more than USD 8 billion.
About Chuck Feeney in brief
Charles Francis Feeney is an Irish-American businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune as a co-founder of the Duty Free Shoppers Group. He is the founder of The Atlantic Philanthropies, one of the largest private charitable foundations in the world. He gave away his fortune in secret for many years, until a business dispute resulted in his identity being revealed in 1997. He has given away more than USD 8 billion. His 2016 donation of USD 250,000 was the largest in the school’s history from a single contributor. He served as a U. S. Air Force radio operator during the Korean War, and began his career selling duty-free liquor to U.S. naval personnel at Mediterranean ports in the 1950s. He graduated from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and was a brother of Alpha Sigma Phi and honorary member of the Sphinx Head Society.
In February 2011, he became a signatory to The Pledge of The Giving Pledge. In his letter to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, he wrote: ‘I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living’ He has also donated around one billion dollars to education in Ireland, mostly to the University of Limerick and Dublin City University. He also supported the Irish nationalist party Sinn Féin and public-health structures in Vietnam. In 2012, he gave away USD 350 million enabling the creation of Cornell’s New York City Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island. The largest single beneficiary of his giving is his alma mater Cornell University, which has received nearly USD 1billion in direct and Atlantic gifts.
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This page is based on the article Chuck Feeney published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 23, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
