How green is the valley? Scrutinizing the 'generosity' of high-tech entrepreneurs.

• Author: Henderson, Rick

Before the Heaven's Gate suicide gripped our attention, the media were targeting another variety of high-tech weirdos: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who haven't given away "enough" of their newfound wealth. In its 1996 year-in-review issue, Newsweek fumed about "The Wealth and Avarice of the CyberRich." A Los Angeles Times story sniped at "digital-era Scrooges." And the cover story of the new quarterly American Benefactor blasted the "misers" of Silicon Valley. "In philanthropic circles," the magazine intoned, "the Valley holds a reputation for being notoriously tight-fisted. Or socially negligent. Or maybe both."

Americans donated a record $140 billion to charity last year, around 2 percent of GDP. The press is taking notice of the high-tech world, in part, because cyber-entrepreneurs have started giving their money away. Over the past few months, David Duffield of PeopleSoft has donated $20 million to Cornell University. Charles Wang of Computer Associates has promised to give as much as $25 million for the construction of an Asian-American cultural center at the SUNY-Stony Brook campus. And in February, David Filo and Jerry Yang, creators of the Yahoo! Web search engine, pledged $2 million to underwrite a professor's chair at Stanford.

But Silicon Valley remains under attack for the "stinginess" of its wealthy inhabitants. Of 50 major metropolitan areas surveyed by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, San Jose ranks last in individual charitable giving. "The libertarian streak that runs through much of Silicon Valley," gripes Newsweek, "prevents many techno-millionaires from seeing themselves as their brother's keeper."

Even though his company is based in Redmond, Washington, no one has felt the charity watchers' wrath as much as Microsoft's Bill Gates. Newsweek chides Gates for giving only about one-third of 1 percent of his net worth to charity. "By merely tithing his assets (something a good many poor people do on a regular, non-whining basis)," suggests The American Benefactor, "Gates could raise [the level of American philanthropy] by $2 billion or more."

"Despite all of his wealth, [Gates] is miserly in terms of the things that he does for charities and social change," the Institute for the Future's Paul Saffo told Upside, "and that's a scandal." The Times story even faults Gates and Microsoft because "only 15% of [the company's charitable giving] was in the form of cash - the rest was software that was valued at the retail price but cost...