Chuck Feeney set out to go for broke – and he gave away billions
Before Bill Gates and Paul Ramsay there was duty-free empire boss Chuck Feeney who made billions and gave it away in his lifetime.
OBITUARY
Charles “Chuck” Feeney
Businessman, philanthropist. Born New Jersey, April 23, 1931; died San Francisco, October 9, aged 92.
Benjamin Franklin may have been the first person to retire. He was only 42. But the unstoppable polymath already had an unmatched, almost breathless track record of achievement.
His dad was a lowly candlemaker but that whiffy business was not for Franklin, who ran away, became a printer, newspaper publisher, diplomat and an inventor. He came up with bifocals, swimming flippers and catheters. He played with electricity, made time to help draft the Declaration of Independence, signed it, then became the first US postmaster general and founded the University of Pennsylvania.
He also invented the idea that the wealthy might show leadership in their communities by spending their back-end years giving away their riches.
Many since have followed his lead: Bill Gates and former wife Melinda plan to give away $30bn in coming years to help prevent and cure diseases, end poverty and invest in education. They have been joined by other billionaires keen to spend time spending money to improve our world, including Virgin’s Richard Branson, financial data king Michael Bloomberg and Australian businessman Paul Ramsay, who died in 2014 and whose philanthropic foundation is our nation’s biggest.
Doing so with much less publicity – for years none at all – was Chuck Feeney. Feeney came from a family Australians would describe as battlers. He was sent to the small Catholic St Mary of the Assumption High School around the corner. Even today it has only about 200 children and 16 teachers. To raise funds it sells T-shirts with the words “Just a Kid from St Mary’s” printed on the front.
Feeney said that school instilled in him a sense of community and the need to share good fortune. He was an early entrepreneur, selling Christmas cards to neighbours and sweeping the snow from their driveways.
He spent a few years as a radio operator in the US Air Force and was based in Japan during the Korean War, and on returning home used the GI Bill benefits to help fund a hotel management university degree.
Seeing the opportunities to sell goods, particularly alcohol and cigarettes, duty-free to US service personnel, tens of thousands of whom were dotted around Asia and the Mediterranean, he and his partner Warren Miller began what turned into an empire, Duty Free Shoppers Group, which started in Hong Kong and can be found at shopping centres and airports around the globe.
From the earliest days, the frugal Feeney – who wore a $20 watch, flew economy, wore frayed jackets and never owned a house while living by the Irish proverb “there are no pockets in a shroud” – started to give way his money. He called it giving while living, but he didn’t tell anyone, not even his partner in wealth. Indeed, for many years, institutions benefiting from his generosity understood that it would end if they named their beneficiary.
Australian health, medicine and educational institutions were often changed by gifts from Feeney’s company, the Atlantic Philanthropies. These include the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, and the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology.
Twelve years ago Feeney, who preferred a recycled shopping bag to a briefcase, earmarked $10m for the Kirby Institute at the University of NSW to investigate how we might deal with another pandemic – almost a decade before Covid-19.
Last year Feeney was appointed an honorary companion of the Order of Australia by the federal government, which said he had changed the culture of philanthropy in Australia. He is believed to have invested about $600m here.
In 1997, during complex legal negotiation as DFS was sold to LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, it emerged that he did not own his share of the conglomerate – Atlantic Philanthropies did and had for years. By then it had invested about $6bn in projects stretching from Feeney’s ancestral home in Ireland to Cuba, Thailand and South Africa.
“I had one idea that never changed in my mind – that you should use your wealth to help people. I try to live a normal life, the way I grew up,” Feeney told Irish author Conor O’Clery, whose book The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune finally revealed much of the life of the tight-lipped businessman. He had set out to work hard, not become wealthy.
Feeney set out to go for broke, and about two years ago he achieved it – he was. Atlantic Philanthropies was given the rest of his money. He had long fallen from the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest. He was just another kid from St Mary’s.
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