Chuck Feeney

Personal life

Feeney was born in New Jersey during the Great Depression and came from a modest background of blue collar Irish-American parents in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His ancestry traces to County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. Feeney graduated from Elizabeth's St. Mary of the Assumption High School in 1949; he has credited his charitable spirit to his experiences at St. Mary and his 2016 donation of $250,000 was the largest in school history from a single contributor. He served as a U.S. Air Force radio operator during the Korean War, and began his career selling duty-free liquor to US naval personnel at Mediterranean ports in the 1950s.

He graduated from the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration and was a brother of Alpha Sigma Phi.

Feeney has four daughters and one son. He has married twice. His first wife, named Danielle, is French. His second wife, and previous secretary, is named Helga.

He is known for his frugality. “Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag. For many years, when in New York, he had lunch not at the city’s luxury restaurants, but in the homey confines of "Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion" on East 57th Street, where he ate the burgers.”

As of 2016, he lives in a rented apartment in San Francisco, with a remaining nest egg of $2 million.

Duty-Free Shoppers

The concept of "duty-free shopping"—offering high-end concessions to travelers, free of import taxes—was in its infancy when Feeney and his college classmate Robert Warren Miller started selling duty-free liquor to American servicemen in Asia in the 1950s. They later expanded to selling cars and tobacco, and founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group (DFS Group) on November 7, 1960. DFS began operations in Hong Kong, later expanding to Europe and other continents. DFS' first major breakthrough came in the early 1960s, when it secured the exclusive concession for duty-free sales in Hawaii, allowing it to market its products to Japanese travelers.

DFS eventually expanded to off-airport duty-free stores and large downtown Galleria stores, and became the world's largest travel retailer. By the mid-1990s, DFS was distributing profits of up to $300 million a year to Feeney, Miller, and two smaller partners. "The rich returns came about in large part because DFS, like most other retailers in Asia, took a far higher markup on Western luxury items than was the case in Europe and the U.S. In New York, a retailer might price a designer handbag at 2.2 or 2.3 times the wholesale price. But in Asia, the retail price was a standard three times wholesale."

In 1996, Feeney and a partner sold their stakes in DFS to the French luxury conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH). Miller opposed the sale, and before a presumptive lawsuit could reveal that Feeney’s stake was owned not in fact by him but by The Atlantic Philanthropies, Feeney outed himself in a New York Times article written by Judith Miller. Atlantic made $1.63 billion from the sale.

Philanthropy

In 1982, Feeney created The Atlantic Philanthropies, and in 1984, secretly transferred his entire 38.75% stake in DFS, then worth about $500 million, to the foundation. Not even his business partners knew that he no longer personally owned any part of DFS.

For years, Atlantic gave away money in secret, requiring recipients to not reveal the sources of their donations. “Beyond Mr. Feeney’s reticence about blowing his own horn, ‘it was also a way to leverage more donations––some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.’”

Feeney has given substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, historically associated with the IRA, and has worked to support peace efforts in Ireland. Through Atlantic, he has also donated around $1 billion to education in Ireland, mostly to third-level institutions such as the University of Limerick.

Feeney has been a major donor to his alma mater Cornell University, which has received nearly $1 billion in direct and Atlantic gifts, including a donation of $350 million enabling the creation of Cornell’s New York City Tech Campus.

He has also supported the modernization of public-health structures in Vietnam.

In February 2011, Feeney became a signatory to The Giving Pledge. In his letter to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the founders of The Giving Pledge, Feeney writes, "I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living—to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition. More importantly, today's needs are so great and varied that intelligent philanthropic support and positive interventions can have greater value and impact today than if they are delayed when the needs are greater."

He gave away his last $7 million in late 2016, to the same recipient of his first charitable donations: Cornell. Over the course of his life, he gave away more than $8 billion.

Accolades

Feeney has been called the “James Bond of philanthropy,” for his secrecy and success. In 1997, Time Magazine said that “Feeney's beneficence already ranks among the grandest of any living American."

He has shunned publicity, although he cooperated in 2007 biography, The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing. Feeney is also the subject of a documentary by RTÉ Factual entitled Secret Billionaire: The Chuck Feeney Story.

In 2010 he received the Cornell Icon of Industry Award.

In 2012, all the universities of Ireland, North and South, jointly conferred an Honorary Doctorate of Laws on Feeney. During the year, he also received Ireland's 'Presidential Distinguished Service Award' for Irish Abroad.

In 2012, he also was awarded the UCSF Medal for outstanding personal contributions to the University of California, San Francisco’s health science mission.

In 2014, Warren Buffett said of Feeney, “[he’s] my hero and Bill Gates’ hero. He should be everybody’s hero.”

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