The former chief executive of YouTube and the co-founder of Zerodha, India’s biggest discount stock-trading platform, have joined the ranks of extremely wealthy people promising to give most of their money to charity.
Susan Wojcicki, who stepped down as YouTube CEO in February, and her husband Dennis Troper have signed the Giving Pledge along with Nikhil Klamath, co-founder of Zerodha.
They’re now among the 241 individuals participating in the Giving Pledge, a public commitment created in 2010 by Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft Inc.
MSFT,
Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage billionaires to be active philanthropists.
Signers of the Giving Pledge promise to give away the majority of their wealth either during their lifetime or in their will. However, the pledge is on the honor system; there’s no enforcement mechanism ensuring participants follow through on their generous intentions.
See also: The Giving Pledge turns 10: These billionaires pledged to give away half their wealth, but they soon ran into a problem
The Giving Pledge is open to billionaires, or “those who would be billionaires if not for their giving,” according to its website. Wojcicki’s estimated net worth is $780 million, according to Forbes. Kamath is worth an estimated $3.45 billion together with his brother, who co-founded Zerodha with him.
Wojcicki, who rented out her Menlo Park, Calif. garage to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, was employee No. 16 at Google
GOOG,
GOOGL,
which owns YouTube. The mother of five children, she said she was leaving YouTube to “start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”
Susan Wojcicki’s sister, Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe, signed the Giving Pledge in 2022. Also that year, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was then estimated to be worth $20.5 billion, signed the pledge. His name was removed from the pledge list after he was arrested on fraud charges.
The list of Giving Pledge signatories includes some of the world’s wealthiest people, including Tesla
TSLA,
CEO and SpaceX co-founder Elon Musk and MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon
AMZN,
founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos himself has not signed the Giving Pledge, but he and his partner Lauren Sanchez have said that they plan to give away most of their fortune.
The latest Giving Pledge signers were announced June 2 after an annual gathering of Giving Pledge participants where Melinda French Gates gave the opening remarks.
Other new Giving Pledge signatories announced June 2 were:
- Ravenel B. Curry III, who co-founded the investment management firm Eagle Capital Management with his late wife Beth.
- Benoit Dageville, the co-founder of Snowflake, the database software company whose IPO set records in 2020, and his wife, Marie-Florence.
- GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa.
- Michael Krasny, founder of Computer Discount Warehouse.
- Canadian entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson, co-founder of Tiny Capital, and his wife Zoe Peterson.
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