The elegant brothers announced on the 18th that Bong-jin Kim, the chairman of the nation’s No. 1 delivery app market share, has been registered as the 219th donor of the world-class donation club’The Giving Pledge’. Previously, among domestic venture companies, Kakao Founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors Kim Beom-soo announced that he would donate more than half of his assets to solve social problems.
The Giving Pledge is a charitable organization founded in 2010 by Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. If your property exceeds 1 billion dollars (1 trillion won), you are eligible to join, and you must donate more than half of your property.
Chairman Kim is the first Korean subscriber to The Giving Pledge, and currently, 218 people from 24 countries (joint names such as couples and families count as 1) are registered as donors. ▲Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ▲Tesla CEO Elon Musk ▲Director George Lucas of Star Wars ▲Larry Ellison Oracle Chairman ▲Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor. Of the 219 people, 75% are self-made billionaires.
Chairman Kim’s property is known to reach 1 trillion won, including the value of DH shares received from the sale of the people of Delivery to Delivery Hero (DH) in Germany. If it is more than half of these, the donation is estimated to exceed 500 billion won. The Giving Pledge released a pledge in English and Korean along with a photo of Chairman Kim and his wife on the website. In his pledge, Chairman Kim said, “I and my wife give back more than half of their wealth to society until they die.” Regarding the reason for the decision to donate, he said, “It is difficult to explain what I have achieved as much as I was lucky and blessed by God.” Added.
Meanwhile, Chairman Kim has donated more than 10 billion won until recently, including a total of 7.1 billion won to the Fruit of Love. Donations are used for medical expenses and living expenses for delivery workers (riders) who are injured during food delivery.
◆ The following is the preface to the donation pledge of Chairman Kim Bong-jin.
Hello, this is Bongjin Kim and Bomi Seol.
First of all, I would like to express my deepest respect and appreciation to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the 218 former donation declarers.
You have deeply inspired many founders like me and delivered a message of hope to many more people.
This story has to be continued by someone and I am honored to be one of the people who continues the story.
Me and my wife, Seol Bomi, declare to give back more than half of their wealth to society before they die.
I would like to inform you that our lovely children, Hannah and Jua, also agreed to this decision. (Even the picture above is a picture taken by Hannah. And the third Daniel is still two years old, so I can’t explain it. .
I am convinced that this donation declaration will be the best legacy of anything we give to our children.
I think that the donation pledge is to openly confess that the wealth I have accumulated is not only because of God’s blessings, social luck, and the help of many people beyond individual ability and effort.
I was born on a very small island in Korea, and when I was in high school, I didn’t have enough room to sleep in the dining room that guests used. I graduated from art college with difficulty, but it is difficult to explain that I was lucky and blessed by God.
As John Rawls put it, I think the value shines even more when the wealth is shared according to the principle of’minimum beneficiary first consideration.’
In 2017, through Facebook, we made a donation pledge to return 10 billion won in 3 years and kept that promise. I think this has been the best decision of our life so far, and now we are going to make a bigger return.
In the process, I experienced the happiness and rewarding of my life, and even thought of growing my business better through it, and I learned a lot from the practical difficulties of the donation process.
Through that learning, we and I are step by step envisioning the future of solving the problem of educational inequality, supporting cultural arts, and creating an organization that helps charities do their job better.
It is also a small force in improving the cognitive and institutional problems that hinder the donation culture, but we are trying to add it.
However, in a world that may live much longer than expected, it seems difficult to make all plans now. It is even more so when you see that problems that were not a problem in the past are now becoming a big problem. As I did during startups, I will continue to learn through various donations and challenges and failures in solving social problems, and I would like to continue working to share that experience with many people and spread the donation culture.
Lastly, 10 years ago, when I was running a small company that had fewer than 20 people in the beginning, I vaguely dreamed that if I succeeded, I would like to declare The Giving Pledge if I saw articles by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. I am very thrilled to announce today. I would be delighted if the dream I had dreamed of became the dream of many founders who challenged to change the world.