In brief
- One of the largest transfers of private wealth in history is underway at precisely the moment that systems underpinning long-term prosperity face mounting pressure. This creates a rare and potentially decisive opportunity for private capital to shape a more sustainable and resilient future.
- History suggests that extreme concentrations of wealth rarely remain politically stable indefinitely. Where wealth is not perceived to contribute to society's wider resilience, governments and societies eventually seek other means of rebalancing resources.
- The question confronting today's wealth holders is not simply how their capital should be preserved, but how it might most effectively be deployed towards strengthening the social and ecological foundations upon which future wealth depends.
- While private and philanthropic capital cannot replace government, it can move more quickly, take greater risks and demonstrate solutions that public institutions and commercial capital can later scale. The tools to unlock this potential are not new: deploying capital at scale, and with a genuine appetite for risk, rather than holding it back for safer, smaller commitments.
- The greatest barrier to realising this potential is not intent but execution. Translating wealth into meaningful impact requires trusted structures, clear priorities and decision-making frameworks that create urgency rather than delay.
- Deployed this way, capital does more than preserve itself: the impact it creates compounds through changed systems, laws and behaviour, often producing returns to society, and ultimately to the families who hold that capital, that outpace anything achieved by simply letting wealth compound in place.
The world's problems increasingly need capital that can move faster than government, multilateral institutions, or the legacy systems that built today's prosperity but now produce many of its hardest challenges. Wealth concentration and inequality are reaching all-time highs, and one of the largest transfers of private wealth in history is beginning. Together, these create a unique opportunity for private capital, deployed with an impact-first mindset and at scale, to shape what comes next.
Society has been here before. The experience of America's last great era of wealth concentration offers both inspiration and warning to today's holders of great private capital.
A moment that has happened before
In 1889, Andrew Carnegie set out his view of how great wealth should be used in his essay The Gospel of Wealth: a fortune left undirected at death was a fortune wasted; those who accumulated great wealth had a duty to direct it well while alive to see it done properly. “The man who dies rich,” he wrote, “dies disgraced.” In 1906, Frederick Gates, who ran Rockefeller's affairs, put it more bluntly: “Your fortune is rolling up like an avalanche. You must distribute it faster than it grows, or it will crush you, and your children.” Rockefeller took the warning seriously enough to found one of the largest philanthropic institutions in the world. Such well-conceived and executed philanthropic missions can offer families a powerful shared point of identity, transmitting values and binding generations together, beyond a mere duty imposed by wealth.
The pattern Gates described is still visible today. Bridgespan's research finds that American families with more than $500 million in assets gave away about 1.2% of that wealth in 2017, and that by 2023 the percentage had barely moved, even as those fortunes compounded above the long-run S&P 500 average. Bequest giving jumped nearly 20% in 2025, while lifetime giving by individuals has barely moved despite strong markets.
Bridgespan's researchers describe wealthy families genuinely committed to giving well. What is missing is not the will, but the conditions that turn intention into decision: vetted opportunities able to absorb very large gifts, trusted advisers who can direct capital toward high-impact but less visible causes, and a deadline that makes the decision happen now.
Perhaps the most important step is building a family-giving mindset that unlocks the superpower of the very wealthy: deploying private capital to back high-risk bets that create transformative impact compounding over years.
What history also tells us
Carnegie and Rockefeller were writing and giving during the Gilded Age, roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s, when fortunes on an unprecedented scale were built within a single working life, principally in railroads, oil and steel. Within a generation, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal income tax and the estate tax had all been introduced. The common thread: if wealth would not moderate its own concentration voluntarily, the state would act to do it.
Some of today's most experienced wealth advisers already sense that pattern returning. Peter Mallouk, whose firm manages some $700 billion in assets, has called the present concentration of wealth “100% completely unsustainable as a society.” Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned it risks producing “irreconcilable differences” that democratic institutions cannot absorb. In September 2026, the UK's Institute of Public Policy Research published tax reform proposals to address growing wealth concentration brought about by AI and related transformations.
This generation of wealth holders faces a choice: direct capital towards the world's most pressing problems now, or leave that decision to whoever comes after them.
What private capital can do, and what it cannot
Private capital is not a substitute for Government. US foundation giving totalled $109.8 billion in 2024, a fraction of the federal grants that flow to American non-profits each year, and that gap has widened: federal grants to core American charities fell from $35.4 billion in 2024 to $21.4 billion in 2025.
What private capital can do is different. Government is accountable to everyone, so it moves carefully. As the Athens Democracy Forum put it, today's democracies “were built for a different era,” with structures “rigid where agility is needed.” Private capital can fund a pilot before the evidence is complete, proving what works quickly so government can then deliver it broadly.
Why the case for acting is stronger now
The pressures facing contemporary society are far larger than those of the Gilded Age: we are no longer confronting only deprivation and inequality, but the deterioration of the natural systems on which prosperity depends.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre's 2025 Planetary Health Check found that seven of nine planetary boundaries have already been breached. A 2026 UK national security assessment found that collapsing ecosystems are directly contributing to food insecurity, natural disasters, and geopolitical instability.
At the same time, aid that used to sit alongside private philanthropy is being withdrawn. Official development assistance fell 23.1% in real terms in 2025, the steepest drop on record; multilateral aid fell 27%, also a record decline.
Yet the wealth available to respond is itself heavily concentrated: global billionaire wealth rose to a record $15.8 trillion in 2025, and the 2026 World Inequality Report holds that the wealthiest 0.001% control three times more wealth than half of humanity combined.
This is an international story
This history is American: the culture of philanthropy today, foundations, the Giving Pledge, the expectation that great wealth carries a public duty, was shaped by American donors from Carnegie onward. The pattern is repeating there most visibly: wealth from the AI boom is concentrated in a handful of American technology companies, the Magnificent Seven, whose combined market value reached around $21.2 trillion in early 2026, more than the EU's entire economic output. But this capital is not confined to the United States.
The wealth, and the families holding it, are increasingly global, with growth in the Gulf and Asia now outpacing the West: many facing this choice have bases in London, the Gulf and Hong Kong, as well as the US. England has a strong claim to be the natural venue for structuring that capital, with its own philanthropic tradition, from the Quaker Cadburys and Rowntrees onward.
Nor is it a Western one. Islamic law formalises the obligation through zakat and the waqf, a charitable endowment underpinning hospitals and schools across the Muslim world for over a millennium. Jewish tradition frames the duty through tzedakah, an obligation of justice rather than charity; Chinese tradition grounds it in Confucian benevolence, given statutory form by China's 2016 Charity Law. England and Wales offer a mature charity regulator and centuries of tested trust law, giving philanthropic structures legal certainty not universally available elsewhere.
What closing the gap actually looks like
Julius Rosenwald, a contemporary of Carnegie and Rockefeller who built his fortune at Sears, Roebuck, rejected the perpetual foundation model outright. Working with Booker T. Washington, he funded more than 5,000 schools for Black children across the segregated American South, and wrote into his charter that it would spend down entirely within 25 years of his death, warning a permanent endowment would otherwise “inject the great fortunes of the day into the affairs of the nation five hundred or a thousand years hence.” His trustees finished the task in sixteen years.
Rosenwald's discipline is instructive today: our problems are among the largest and most urgent humanity has faced, and the case for applying capital to them now, rather than preserving it in perpetuity, is hard to resist. The impact of a changed system compounds freely, propagating through law and behaviour long after the capital is spent, whereas an endowed institution must perpetually redeploy its funds to sustain the same effect.
Applying capital to these challenges now is critical, but arguably most important is the wealthy individual's superpower to make high-risk bets that only a principal can make. The Rockefellers are a brilliant example of a family that has done so, to great impact, over multiple generations.
The same discipline shows up elsewhere. James Chen, whose philanthropic mantra is to “privatise failure and socialise success,” established 's Clearly, a campaign which proved, through a trial among Assam tea pickers, that vision correction lifted daily productivity by 21.7%, helping secure a 2021 UN resolution on universal eye care by 2030. The Sustainable Markets Initiative, founded by King Charles III, argues the mechanisms for deploying capital at scale already exist; what is missing is capital at the scale required. And MacKenzie Scott has given away more than $26 billion since 2020 through unrestricted grants made without the usual years of process, a reminder that friction slowing large-scale giving is often a choice, not a necessity.
What this means in practice
The barriers described a lack of trust, too much choice, and the absence of urgency, are questions a family can answer directly. Rosenwald's sunset clause and advisers who specialise in vetting large-scale opportunities are established approaches. Who do you trust enough to direct capital toward opportunities you cannot evaluate alone? And what deadline will make today's intention binding rather than aspirational? These are, in substance, the questions Carnegie was asking in 1889.
Whichever time horizon one chooses, Rosenwald and the Rockefellers both distinguish this impact-first approach from the default: rather than letting capital compound quietly while urgent problems compound around it, each built a structure that kept the question of use alive.
Families who think carefully about how their capital can be used, across their philanthropy, business and investments, put themselves in a stronger position to address the risks Mallouk and Dalio describe, and to shape how this period in history is remembered.
How we can help
Alexander Rhodes OBE is a partner and head of Mishcon Purpose. Alongside his specialist charity and private client partners, Alexander has the privilege of advising UHNW families and their family offices in turning philanthropic intent into structured, deployable capital for impact.
He has a number of board and advisory positions and sits on the Advisory Board of the Democracy and Culture Foundation. For the last four years, Alexander has led the firm's relationship with the Sustainable Markets Initiative.
The firm's dedicated services include:
- Developing family purpose and governance frameworks, such as family charters, that embed a shared giving philosophy alongside succession and wealth planning, so philanthropy is built into a family's broader governance rather than sitting apart from it
- Structuring the right vehicle for that strategy, from charitable foundations to impact investment and family office structures, including cross-border holding arrangements
- Restructuring or establishing philanthropic vehicles internationally to diversify funding sources, strengthen governance and protect mission continuity across jurisdictions
- Building the frameworks, KPIs and reporting that let a family measure and evidence the real-world impact of its giving, not just the amount given
- Advising on strategic litigation as a higher-risk, higher-impact complement to traditional grant-making, including funding the early-stage development of cases capable of setting precedent and driving systemic change
- Structuring giving for tax efficiency and cost-effectiveness, so more of each gift reaches its intended purpose
- Managing the reputational and financial risks that accompany large-scale or high-profile giving
- To discuss how we might support your family's philanthropic strategy, please get in touch.