Will a boom in philanthropic prize-giving change the world?
Tycoons gathering this weekend at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters will be giving money away, not trying to make more. Larry Page, one of the search firm's founders and, with a personal fortune estimated at over $14 billion, one of the world's richest 33-year-olds, is holding a fundraiser for one of his favourite charitable causes, the X Prize Foundation. The foundation is a force behind one of the most intriguing trends in philanthropy: promoting change by offering prizes.
It has worked before. The chronometer was invented to win an 18th-century British government prize. Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to win $25,000 offered by Raymond Orteig, a hotelier. That inspired Peter Diamandis, the X Prize's creator, to offer $10m for the first private space flight, won in 2004 by SpaceShipOne.
In October the foundation launched its second prize, for genomics: $10m to the first inventor able to sequence 100 human genomes in ten days. In the same month Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese mobile-phone entrepreneur, endowed an annual prize of $5m plus $200,000 a year for life for former African leaders reckoned to have governed well. Last month a British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, launched the Virgin Earth Challenge, offering $25m to the inventor of a commercially and environmentally viable method of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
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