Over the past three years, multimillionaire Bill Pulte has given away more than $1.2 million to individual Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) users in need. So-called Twitter philanthropy has been on the rise in recent years, but, like other forms of grassroots philanthropy, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the needs of those asking for help.
Pulte began his efforts on Twitter roughly six months before the pandemic, and the economic turmoil seen since then has driven up his popularity on the site. According to Pulte, he receives new requests every minute of every hour for assistance from single parents, individuals experiencing homelessness, and countless others.
Pulte, CEO of his own private equity firm and heir to homebuilding giant PulteGroup, says he has a team of volunteers helping him sift through the thousands of requests on Twitter, requests that he can grant almost instantaneously.
So far, Pulte's single largest donation was $50,000, but the usual amounts range from just over a hundred to thousands of dollars. Not all of the money comes from Pulte himself; instead, he's partnered with TeamGiving.com and promotes various campaigns to his millions of followers. Pulte's ultimate vision is to create a massive online group of TeamGiving.com donors who can vote on causes.
"I think that that in many ways could be just as good, if not better than Social Security or Medicaid," Pulte said, adding "I haven't figured that out yet."
However, right now, philanthropy experts say that, while Pulte's method has its benefits, it's nowhere near enough. Rather than endlessly addressing individual issues, experts like Timi Gerson, vice president and chief content officer at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, say that broader change is needed rather than the "grotesque Hunger Games" of Twitter philanthropy.
"If you want to effectively solve the deeper problem, you've got to fund groups and organizations that are looking at things systematically," Gerson said.
For his part, Pulte agrees that a broader approach is needed, but he is resistant to the idea of putting philanthropic organizations in charge, pointing to alleged widespread "corruption, fraud and abuse."
"Government should be doing it," Pulte told reporters. "But in the absence of government, we have to step up and help people who are dying of cancer, who can't afford their diabetes insulin pump, who don't have teeth."
While Twitter philanthropy may be somewhat new, grassroots giving is not, and the inequality seen on sites like GoFundMe has been well documented. According to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, less than two out of every ten campaigns met their goals, and nearly two in five saw no donations at all. The study also showed that giving was lower in areas with higher medical debt and uninsurance rates.
"In economic circumstances such as we live in today, in which desperate need has gone up, meeting the basic needs of people can't ever be fulfilled through idiosyncratic giving responses," said Rob Reich, a Stanford University political scientist. "There are alternative and more systematic mechanisms for meeting basic needs."