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Leading Gambling911.com sponsor Bookmaker.com has posted odds on the first billionaire to sign Bill Gates Giving Pledge in 2010 with John Paulson leading that pack at +750 odds (a $100 bet pays out $750).
Other notable favorites include corporate raider Carl Icahn at +800 odds and George Soros at +800.
Many skeptics have suggested the Bill Gates/Warren Buffet effort at getting billionaires to donate significant chunks of their wealth to charity is nothing more than a “giant ego trip” on their part. This is especially true in Germany as the duo tries to expand its campaign worldwide.
According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, wealthy Germans "are responding skeptically to this effort," with one German asset manager contacted by Gates saying that many of the country's super-rich have already transferred more than half of their wealth to charity and consider the "Giving Pledge" campaign "too ostentatious." Another billionaire "blasted the effort as 'a bad transfer of power from the state to billionaires,'" the German magazine Der Spiegel reports in its international edition.
Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
