Atlantic Philanthropies has announced that its founder, Charles F. “Chuck” Feeney, died in San Francisco on October 9, at the age of 92.

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on April 23, 1931, into a working-class, Irish-American immigrant family, Feeney enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1948. With support from the G.I. Bill, he earned a bachelor’s degree in hotel management in 1956 from Cornell University. Upon graduation, Feeney traveled extensively in Europe, eventually co-founding Duty Free Shoppers (DFS), the world’s largest luxury goods retailer. Through the General Atlantic Group, he continued to expand the business into new global ventures.

In 1982, Feeney and his family established what became Atlantic Philanthropies, and two years later, he quietly transferred the vast majority of his stake in DFS (estimated at more than $500 million at the time) to the foundation. Before shutting its doors in 2020, Atlantic made grants totaling more than $8 billion—anonymously until 1997—in support of efforts to advance global education, health, research and innovation, human rights, and peacemaking principally in the United States, the Republic of Ireland, Britain, Northern Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Vietnam, Bermuda, and Cuba. Investments totaling nearly $1 billion were made to Cornell, which describes him as its “third founder.”

Feeney chose to live frugally and did not seek attention for his philanthropic giving, and in the last three decades, he did not own a car or home. In addition, he refused to have his name on any of the hundreds of buildings his foundation helped fund, instead often using the naming opportunity to encourage other philanthropic support. In his official biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t, Feeney said, “I had one idea that never changed in my mind—that you should use your wealth to help people....[It’s] much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead.”

In keeping with this belief, Atlantic was a limited-life organization, and in September 2020, Feeney signed dissolution papers. It is the largest foundation in history to intentionally deploy its entire endowment, with final grants establishing seven international Atlantic Fellows programs to aid people and their vision to realize a better world.

In 2011, Feeney became the 59th signatory of the Giving Pledge, and throughout his life received many accolades, including the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy in 2014 and the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2015.

“Use your wealth to help people. Use your wealth to create institutions to help people,” Feeney often said. “When it comes down to it, it’s always people.”

(Photo credit: Cornell University)