Welcome back to Puck.

Greetings after a long weekend from my hometown of Dover, Delaware. I will be in New York and Washington over the next few weeks—reach out and reply to this note if you want to get together.

Meanwhile, today I’d like to bring you to a luxury resort in Southern California—where dozens of the world’s wealthiest people will gather on Wednesday for a very confidential summit on their philanthropy.

Mentioned in this email: MacKenzie Scott, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Charlie Rose, Reed Hastings, Nate and Elizabeth Blecharczyk and what happens when you send septuagenarians on a zipline. So this week is as good a time as any to subscribe, if you haven’t already, or to gift a subscription to a friend.

The annual gathering of The Giving Pledge is a fascinating window into the arts and science of big-dollar donations. The Pledge was launched back in 2010 by Bill, Melinda and Warren Buffett with an ask for people with more than $1 billion in net worth to publicly commit to donate more than half of their wealth to charity in their lifetime or in their wills, and attendees look forward to the yearly celebrations. But much has changed since the Gates and Buffett fan club last gathered in-person in the late spring of 2019. Obviously there was the pandemic, which placed Bill Gates at the height of his powers and influence as a public intellectual, on television seemingly every day in the early weeks of Covid, dispensing pearls of public-health wisdom. The Foundation spent considerable time over the last two years pondering the role that it should play during the crisis, and just how hard to push other donors to respond to a once-in-a-century call-to-arms moment for philanthropy...