Chuck Feeney secretly handed his Duty Free Shoppers stake to a foundation in 1984, gave away more than $8 billion, and kept about $2 million

Charles Feeney was born in 1931 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and went to Cornell on the GI Bill. In 1960 he and Robert Warren Miller founded Duty Free Shoppers, which made both men billionaires. Feeney had read Andrew Carnegie's essay on wealth. In 1982 he set up the Atlantic Foundation, and in 1984 he irrevocably transferred all his DFS shares to it. Forbes went on listing him as a billionaire^†. His role became public in a New York Times report in January 1997, when the DFS stake was being sold to LVMH^† and a lawsuit was threatened. Over almost four decades Atlantic gave more than $8 billion in 6,500 grants, including $1.3 billion in the Republic of Ireland and $570 million in Northern Ireland. It made its last grant commitment at the end of 2016. In September 2020 Feeney signed the papers dissolving the foundation in his San Francisco office, with his wife Helga present. As of 2016 he lived in a rented apartment in San Francisco with about $2 million left, according to the New York Times. He had five children. He died on 9 October 2023, aged 92.