James Chen: What makes a very good billionaire?

I had invested heavily in adjustable-power lenses that I believed were a game-changer for low-income countries. The World Bank wasn’t convinced. After two years of lobbying, I got a crushing no.

Most donors would have called that the end of the idea. I treated it as the beginning of a different one. Rather than retreating, I absorbed that failure and launched Vision for a Nation, a charity built to test whether universal eyecare could work at national scale — starting in Rwanda, a country eyecare professionals at the time insisted couldn’t support it.

By taking on the full financial risk myself, training 2,700 local nurses, and conducting screenings across all 15,000 of Rwanda’s villages, we built a national health model that proved the skeptics wrong. Rwanda became the first country in the world with universal access to affordable vision correction.

Philanthropy has always been judged less by intention than by outcome — and today, as public trust in institutions frays, that scrutiny has never been sharper. The debate is no longer just about whether the rich are giving back, but what it achieves — whether it’s truly moving the needle on a social or environmental issue or if it is merely funding safe, low-risk projects, such as eponymous hospital wings or alma mater donations, for quiet recognition.

Donating, as many do, to check a box or as a reputation-building exercise accomplishes very little. It undermines the true superpower of philanthropy: its unique agency to serve as early-stage risk capital for radical, systemic innovation.

Unlike governments or private institutions, philanthropists do not have taxpayers and shareholders to keep happy, nor do they require permission to pursue an ambitious goal. With this freedom comes the unique ability to absorb any costs from a failed bet, and ensure that when a bold gamble pays off, the benefits are socialised globally.

I learned the necessity of this risk-taking, “moonshot mindset” through two decades of my own philanthropy, making vision correction a universal right — a problem affecting 2.2 billion people worldwide. 

Yet audacious projects require time and capital. The 10 years it took to take Rwanda from concept to completion taught me what a moonshot mindset actually requires, and attempting to replicate this country-by-country with finite private capital would have taken lifetimes. To de-risk this issue for global institutions that still viewed vision as a low priority, we needed to disrupt the status quo of world leaders.

I founded the Clearly campaign and commissioned rigorous research trials to prove the economic impact of vision correction. Our randomised controlled trial among tea-pickers in Assam, India, showed that workers given glasses saw a 21.7% increase in daily productivity.

By reframing eyecare from an overlooked health issue into a massive economic growth driver, we created the irrefutable evidence base that led the United Nations to pass its landmark 2021 resolution committing all 193 member states to eyecare for all by 2030.

This is what high-risk, bold philanthropy looks like in practice: using patient capital to prove a concept, absorb the failure, and create the irrefutable evidence needed to unlock institutional scale.

We now stand on the precipice of a new era in giving. The great wealth transfer is set to hand upward of $124 trillion to a new generation by 2048, while pioneering tech founders and AI investors are generating unprecedented wealth through radical disruption. They already possess the entrepreneurial drive and risk tolerance that modern philanthropy desperately lacks.

While many may not yet know where or how to deploy their capital for maximum societal impact, we must not let this moment slip away. We must encourage this new generation to bring their disruptive instincts into the philanthropic sphere, shaping their giving into a catalytic, high-reward force and redefining what it truly means to be a “good” billionaire in the modern era.

Private capital possesses a singular, untapped power to confront the most daunting global crises. It is time it was deployed with the ambition it deserves.

James Chen is the founder of the Clearly campaign and chairman of The Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation.

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