全球视野 | 秘密捐出所有财富的亿万富翁查克·费尼：慈善界的詹姆斯·邦德

The selfless billionaire is a rare creature indeed. Chuck Feeney, who died on Monday at the age of 92, was one of them. He is “my hero and Bill Gates’ hero,” Warren Buffett once remarked. “He should be everybody’s hero.” Indeed, Feeney was an inspiration for the Giving Pledge that Buffett and the Gateses launched in 2010, whose 241 megawealthy signatories have promised to dedicate a majority of their fortunes toward charitable pursuits. 

无私奉献的亿万富翁确实是一种罕见的生物。10月9日去世、享年92岁的查克·费尼就是其中之一。沃伦·巴菲特曾说过，他是“我的英雄和比尔·盖茨的英雄”，“他应该是每个人的英雄”。事实上，费尼是巴菲特和盖茨夫妇于2010年发起的“捐赠誓言”的灵感来源，该誓言的241位超级富豪签署者，承诺将把他们的大部分财富用于慈善事业。 

Feeney did a lot better than a “majority.” By the time the pledge was announced, he was reluctant to join because he was no longer a billionaire. He’d long since heeded Andrew Carnegie’s advice that a rich man should distribute his fortune for the public good during his lifetime—else “die disgraced.” 

比起“大多数”，费尼做得更好。在宣布誓言时，他不太愿意加入，因为他不再是亿万富翁。他早就听从了安德鲁·卡内基的建议，即富人应该在有生之年将财富用于公益事业，否则就会“羞耻地死去”。 

In 2016, Feeney’s charitable foun­dation pledged the last remaining sliver of his staggering wealth to Cornell, cap­ping an epic three-decade giving streak. All told, starting in the early 1980s, Feeney had doled out $8.6 billion, setting aside a scant $2 million for himself and his second wife, Helga, to live on in their old age. For every $100,000 Feeney gave away, he kept about $25. 

2016年，费尼的慈善基金会将他惊人财富中最后剩下的那点，捐给了康奈尔大学，结束了长达30年的捐赠。总而言之，从20世纪80年代初开始，费尼已经捐出了86亿美元，只为自己和第二任妻子赫尔加留了200万美元，以供他们晚年生活。费尼每捐出10万美元，就会留下约25美元。 

Feeney grew up in a working-class family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, during the Great Depression. He was entrepreneurial from the get-go according to Conor O’Clery’s 2007 biography of Feeney, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t. After serving a noncombat stint in the Air Force, he was admitted to the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell on the GI Bill, earn­ing extra cash by selling homemade sandwiches at night on frater­nity row. 

大萧条时期，查克·费尼在新泽西州伊丽莎白的一个工人家庭长大。根据康纳·奥克莱里在2007年出版的费尼传记《不是亿万富翁的亿万富翁/The Billionaire Who Wasn't》，费尼从一开始就很有创业精神。他因为《退伍军人法案/GI Bill》进入康奈尔大学酒店管理学院学习，晚上在兄弟会街区卖自制三明治赚外快。 

He later hustled his way into a graduate program in France, where he teamed up with a former Cornell classmate, Robert Miller, to sell tax-free liquor, and later cars, to American troops overseas. Their partnership would evolve into a business decidedly more lucra­tive. Feeney, Miller, and their friends basically invented the duty-free industry, those stores that sell tax-free liquor and perfume and ciga­rettes and accessories in airports and tourist destinations worldwide. “They were making literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” says attorney Harvey Dale, another Cornell alum, whom the part­ners brought on as their counsel. “Because of the structure that I had helped put in place, almost none of that was being taxed.” 

后来，他通过努力考上了法国的研究生，并与康奈尔大学的前同学罗伯特·米勒合作，向海外美军销售免税酒，后来又销售汽车。他们的合作关系后来发展成了一项利润丰厚的生意。费尼、米勒和他们的朋友基本上发明了免税行业，即在世界各地的机场和旅游景点销售免税酒类、香水、香烟和饰品的商店。律师哈维·戴尔是另一位康奈尔大学校友，被合伙人聘为法律顾问，他说：“他们每年赚数亿美元，由于我帮助建立的结构，几乎所有这些收入都没有被征税。” 

For a time, Feeney and his French wife, Danielle, lived the high life in Hong Kong. They had an apartment in New York City and homes in Connecticut, Hawaii, Cap Ferret on the coast of France, and just outside Paris. They had a luxury car and a driver and threw fancy parties. Miller went so far as to host bird hunts at his own 32,000-acre Gunnerside Estate in North Yorkshire— “the holy grail of grouse moors”—and two of his daughters married actual princes. 

有一段时间，费尼和他的法国妻子丹妮尔在香港过着奢华的生活。他们在纽约有一套公寓，在康涅狄格州、夏威夷、法国海岸的费雷角和巴黎郊外都有住所。他们有一辆豪车和一名司机，还举办豪华派对。费尼的合伙人罗伯特·米勒甚至在自己位于北约克郡、占地32000英亩的冈纳赛德庄园举办狩鸟活动，他的两个女儿嫁给了真正的王子。 

But over time, Feeney, who viewed wealth primarily as a scorecard of his business prowess, grew increasingly uncomfortable with its trappings. He dis­cussed his reservations with Dale, by then a close friend, who intro­duced him to Carnegie’s writings. Feeney was particularly smitten with Carnegie’s famous 1889 essay, Wealth, later retitled The Gospel of Wealth. He began to eschew the material extravagances, dressing plainly, driving a normal car, and wearing a $15 watch. He traveled constantly, carried whatever he’d been reading in a plastic tote, and could have afforded a fleet of private jets but insisted on flying coach instead. “He famously said, ‘I don’t need more than one pair of shoes. I can only wear one pair at a time,’” Dale told me. 

但随着时间的推移，费尼，一个把财富主要看作是商业能力的评分的人，逐渐对财富的牵绊感到越来越不舒服。他与当时的好友戴尔讨论了自己的疑惑，戴尔向他介绍了卡内基的著作。费尼对卡内基1889年的名著《财富》（后改名为《财富的福音》）尤为着迷。他开始摒弃物质上的奢侈，衣着朴素，开一辆普通的汽车，戴一块15美元的手表。他经常旅行，把读过的书都装在一个塑料手提袋里，他本可以买得起私人飞机，但却坚持乘坐经济舱。戴尔告诉作者：“费尼有一句名言：‘我不需要一双以上的鞋子。我一次只能穿一双鞋。’” 

Feeney hatched a plan to give all his money. Duty Free Shoppers, as the business was called, was obsessed with secrecy. Its profitability depended on governments and business rivals undervaluing the company’s right to sell tax-free concessions, so the partners held their cards close. Feeney, who didn’t want people hounding him for money or charities viewing him as their ATM, applied the same ethos to his philanthropy. His stake in DFS and other businesses was consolidated into a holding company called Gen­eral Atlantic Group, incorporated in Danielle’s name to sidestep US taxes and to keep Feeney’s name off the paperwork. Even photograph­ing him was verboten. 

费尼制定了一个计划来把所有的钱都捐出去。这家名为Duty Free Shoppers/DFS的公司，对保密性有着痴迷的追求。这家公司的盈利能力取决于政府和商业对手是否低估了公司出售免税特许权的价值，因此合伙人都严守秘密。费尼不希望别人追着他要钱，也不希望慈善机构把他当成提款机，他把同样的精神应用到了慈善事业中。他在DFS和其他业务中的股份被整合到一家名为泛大西洋集团/General Atlantic Group的控股公司中。公司以他的妻子丹妮尔的名义注册成立，以规避美国税收，并使费尼的名字不能保留在文件中，甚至连拍摄他的照片也被禁止。 

One day in 1984, without telling even his business part­ners, he transferred ownership of General Atlantic Group over to the Atlantic Foundation, a charitable entity he’d set up in Bermuda with Dale as president and CEO. 

1984年的一天，费尼甚至没有告诉他的商业伙伴，就将泛大西洋集团的所有权转让给了大西洋基金会/Atlantic Foundation，这是他在百慕大成立的一个慈善实体，戴尔担任主席兼CEO。 

He and Dale also created an intermedi­ary firm to manage charitable gifts and interview would-be grant­ees. Those beneficiaries, who were forbidden from acknowledging their gifts publicly, had no idea where the money was coming from. 

费尼和戴尔还成立了一家中介公司，负责管理慈善捐赠，并与潜在受赠人面谈。这些受益人被禁止公开承认他们的捐赠，他们根本不知道钱是从哪里来的。 

Chris Oechsli, Chuck and Helga’s personal attorney and until recently the CEO of At­lantic Philanthropies (the now-defunct umbrella entity that included Feeney’s Atlantic Foundation), told me that when he first interviewed for a position at Gen­eral Atlantic in 1990, he was unaware who Feeney was or the role he played in the organization. Before meeting his future boss, Oechsli was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. He worked at General Atlantic Group almost two years before realizing the whole thing was a philanthropic venture. “We operated on a need-to-know basis,” Dale explains. 

克里斯·奥克斯利是查克·费尼和赫尔加·费尼的私人律师，直到最近他还是大西洋慈善组织/Atlantic Philanthropies（现已解散的伞形实体，其中包括了费尼的大西洋基金会）的CEO。奥克斯利告诉作者，1990年他第一次面试泛大西洋集团的职位时，并不知道费尼是谁，也不知道费尼在该组织中扮演的角色。在见到他未来的老板之前，奥克斯利被要求签署一份保密协议。他在泛大西洋集团工作了近两年，才意识到整件事是一项慈善事业。戴尔解释说：“我们是在按需知密的基础上运作的。” 

Feeney, who was Irish-American, used his riches over the years to broker a peace agreement in Northern Ireland, finance a public health system in Vietnam, ex­pand access to AIDS drugs in Southern Africa, and support young leaders around the world—the Atlantic Fellows—who are working to improve their societies. He bankrolled Ireland’s public university system and donated billions to American universities—including about $1 billion to Cornell—never allowing the schools to affix his name, or Atlantic’s, to the buildings he paid for. He lobbied, too, to keep himself off the Forbes list, and managed to dispense with huge sums before the New York Times finally outed him in 1997. His stealthy ex­ploits earned him a nickname: “the James Bond of philanthropy.” 

费尼是一名爱尔兰裔美国人，多年来，他利用自己的财富在北爱尔兰促成了一项和平协议，为越南的公共卫生系统提供资金，扩大了非洲南部艾滋病药物的获取范围，并支持世界各地、正在努力改善社会的年轻领袖，他们被称为大西洋研究员。他资助了爱尔兰的公立大学系统，并向美国大学捐赠了数十亿美元，其中包括向康奈尔大学捐赠了约10亿美元。但费尼从未允许学校在他出资建造的建筑物上，加上他的名字或大西洋的名字。他还进行游说，不让自己登上福布斯排行榜。并在1997年《纽约时报》最终公开他之前，设法分发了巨额资金。他的秘密行动为他赢得了一个绰号：“慈善界的詹姆斯·邦德”。 

The word “philanthropy” comes from the Greek philanthrōpos, an amalgam of phil (love) and anthrōpos (human). Loosely translated, it means “humane,” or “kindly.” Given the right incentives and motiva­tions, philanthropy can be exactly that. When the public learned of his generosity, Feeney was hailed, feted, and awarded honorary de­grees. O’Clery’s book was a best-seller. And Dale told me he’s been advising several “very wealthy people” who plan to fol­low in Feeney’s footsteps. 

“philanthropy/慈善”一词来自希腊文philanthrōpos，是phil（爱）和anthrōpos（人）的合成词。粗略翻译，它的意思是 “人道”或“仁慈”。如果有正确的激励和动机，慈善事业可以做到这一点。当公众得知他的慷慨时，费尼受到了欢呼、盛情款待和荣誉学位的授予。康纳·奥克莱里出版的费尼传记成为畅销书。戴尔告诉本文作者，他一直在为几位“非常富有的人”提供建议，这些人计划追随费尼的脚步。 

I met Feeney in September 2020 at General Atlantic Group’s San Francisco offices. It was a momentous occasion: the signing of his foundation’s dissolu­tion papers. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a personal note to mark the occasion, and just before I arrived, Feeney, whose pandemic ensemble included a navy blue mask, had watched a laudatory video from former governor Jerry Brown, with another one from Gates on deck. Feeney, who had suffered health setbacks and could no longer speak, nonetheless appeared to be alert and taking in this celebration of a life well lived. 

2020年9月，作者在泛大西洋集团的旧金山办事处见到了费尼。那是一个重要的时刻：签署他基金会的解散文件。然后，时任众议院议长的南希·佩洛西发来了一份私人祝贺。就在作者到达之前，费尼（他的疫情防护装备包括一个海军蓝的口罩）观看了前加州州长杰里·布朗的赞扬视频，盖茨也发来了另一段视频。虽然费尼的健康状况不佳，而且已经无法说话，但他似乎很清醒，并且沉浸在这场庆祝美好生活的活动中。 

The existence of billionaires has been called a policy failure, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Hitting the three-comma mark is next to impossible in the absence of tax codes that offer the affluent extraordinary workarounds and favor passive investment profits over actual work. In Feeney’s case, the international nature of the company allowed him and his part­ners to largely avoid US taxes altogether. But he did give it all back in the end, which really is something—the only Giving Pledger I know of who is even on track to match that feat is MacKenzie Scott, who has been thoughtfully shoveling her former husband Jeff Bezos’ fortune out the door as fast as she can. So think of Feeney what you will. Just don’t call him self-serving. 

亿万富豪的存在被称为政策的失败，这是很有道理的。如果不是税法为富人提供特别的变通办法，并且偏袒被动投资利润而非实际工作，那么财富要达到十亿大关几乎是不可能的。在费尼的案例中，公司的国际性质使他和他的合伙人在很大程度上完全避开了美国的税收。但他最终还是把所有钱都捐赠出去了，这真的很了不起。据作者所知，唯一能与他相提并论的捐赠誓言承诺者是麦肯齐·斯科特，她以最快的速度将其前夫杰夫·贝索斯的财产倾囊而出。所以，不论怎样看待费尼，都不要说他自私自利。