Chuck Feeney

Chuck Feeney. "Giving while living."

Chuck (Charles) Feeney was born on April 23, 1931, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. His Irish roots go back to Co. Fermanagh and he holds dual citizenship in Ireland and the USA. 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 financed his way through Cornell University’s hotel management school as the “sandwich man,” selling 700 baloney-and-cheeses a week out of a wicker basket.
He made his fortune as a co-founder with Robert Warren Miller of the Duty Free Shoppers Group in 1960. DFS eventually expanded to off-airport duty free stores and large downtown Galleria stores, and became the world’s largest travel retailer. In 1996, Miller’s and Feeney’s interests were acquired by Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, the French luxury goods group, for $1.63 billion.
Earlier in 1992, Feeney had secretly transferred the vast majority of his near 40% stake in “Duty Free Shoppers” (DFS) to his charitable foundation – Atlantic Philanthropies, which has donated several hundred million dollars to finance university research, libraries and on-campus accommodation on both sides of the Irish border. The main academic beneficiaries were Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University, and the University of Limerick and his his alma mater Cornell University. His total donation to the island of Ireland comes to about 1$ billion.
All the while, in keeping with his long held desire for anonymity and his sense of modesty, Chuck Feeney refused honorary degrees and asked that his name be kept off buildings funded through his charitable foundation.
His belief in the “giving while living” philosophy, adopted from Andrew Carnegie, has influenced Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to “give while living.” In early 2011, he joined Giving Pledge, the charity launched by Gates and Buffet, whereby he undertook to give, while he was still alive, to the charity the remaining of his wealth not committed to the Atlantic Philantrophies.
He once said: “I had one idea that never changed in my mind — that you should use your wealth to help people. I try to live a normal life, the way I grew up.” He added: “I set out to work hard, not to get rich.”
He became involved in the Irish peace process after watching news of the Enniskillen bomb on television in 1987. “I just thought, this isn’t us. I hadn’t been involved, but I thought, this is something we should get involved in, and I got involved.”
A 2003 article in Irish America magazine noted that Feeney’s personal donations to Sinn Féin amounted to over a quarter of a million dollars, making him the organisation’s largest American donor at the time. The donations were personal ones, made outside of his foundations.

He has ben described in Bloomberg Businessweek as “the man who compiled what would today be worth $4 billion, buys his suits off the rack, uses a plastic bag for a briefcase, sports drugstore spectacles, wears a $15 plastic watch, and flies coach. He owns no house and no car. He wonders aloud about the need for more than one pair of shoes. When he’s in New York, he likes to dine on chicken pot pies at grubby midtown dives.”

Until his 76th birthday he always flew economy class, but his foundation in 2007 passed a resolution instructing him to travel business class, for health reasons.

He has four daughters and one son. Two of the daughters are Diane V. Feeney and Leslie D. Feeney Baily. He married twice. In 2007, his life story was told in The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune Without Anyone Knowing, by Conor O’Clery.

Has said:

“Giving while living has got to be better than giving while dead.”

“nobody can wear two pairs of shoes at one time.”