Charles F. Feeney, the billionaire whose foundation pledged $350-million to help Cornell University win the competition to build a new applied-science campus in New York City, is a Cornell alumnus who is believed to have given nearly a billion dollars to the university while supporting a variety of other education, health, and human-rights efforts.
He is known as a man with a sharp eye for retail opportunities, but also for living modestly, having turned over all but about $5-million of his fortune to his foundation in the early 1980s—long before Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett began urging the wealthy to give more of their money away. Now 80, he continues to fly in coach class and owns neither a home nor a car, his foundation says.
According to a biography produced for Irish television, Mr. Feeney grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood in Elizabeth, N.J., where he attended a Roman Catholic school before enlisting in the Air Force during the Korean War. He attended Cornell on the G.I. Bill, graduating from the university’s School of Hotel Administration in 1956. In 1960 he helped found Duty Free Shoppers, a retail chain catering to travelers. The company made him rich even before he sold his interest in it in 1996.
By the early 1980s, however, he was earning so much that his wealth began to worry him, and in 1982 he created the precursor to what is now the Atlantic Philanthropies, which so far has given away more than $5.5-billion. In 2010, for instance, it gave $285-million in the United States, Australia, Bermuda, Ireland, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Vietnam, concentrating on programs related to children, aging, health, and social justice.
For years, Mr. Feeney kept his philanthropic activities secret, and even last week the announcement that Cornell had received $350-million described the grant as having been made anonymously, though Mr. Feeney’s involvement became public on Monday.
In 1997, fearing that a lawsuit by a former business partner would reveal the source of many anonymous gifts, he took credit for them by calling the beneficiaries and The New York Times. In recent years, Mr. Feeney has cooperated on a biography—The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, published in 2007—and has urged other wealthy people to give away their money while they’re still alive.
Among other higher-education institutions benefiting from Atlantic Philanthropies grants over the years have been Ithaca College, Portland State University, the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, and the University of Pennsylvania. Overseas beneficiaries include Dublin City University and Trinity College, in Ireland, and the University of the Western Cape, in South Africa. The organization says it intends to spend all of its assets by 2017.
Correction (12/27, 1:44 p.m.): This article originally reported incorrectly on Mr. Feeney’s role in the preparation of a recent book about him, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t. He cooperated with Conor O’Clery, the author of the book, which was a biography; he did not authorize it as an autobiography. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
