I give it 5 years until the last docx will be phased out for Markdown. Computers are for agents now, and token-efficient representations will dominate. It's going to be Python, Markdown, and JSON all the way down.

Have been noodling on an actual piece about this, but I think this sentiment somewhat misunderstands the Carnegies/Rockefellers and how their foundations actually came about/became effective. Carnegie had been giving for decades, but he really kicked it into high gear after he sold Carnegie Steel and retired. He was 65. Likewise, even though Rockefeller began giving much earlier, the Rockefeller Foundation, his philanthropic capstone, wasn’t chartered until 1913…when Rockefeller was 73. A lot of today’s fortunes are 1) still being made and 2) being accrued by people who are much earlier in both their careers and their philanthropic lives than Carnegie and Rockefeller were when their philanthropic institutions reached maturity (not that this should absolve them of any sense of noblesse oblige *today*). These great philanthropies also can’t be separated from the era in which they were created: Protestant ideas about stewardship, the general Progressive Era reform culture, anxieties about (and outright hostility toward) dynastic wealth, reputational pressures on the new industrial rich, and limited U.S. state capacity wrt education, public health, and scientific research, were all contributing factors to their inception. The second and more important piece of the story to me, though, is that sentiments like this give too much credit to the billionaires themselves. The *other* thing each of these men had was brilliant advisors. Rockefeller, for example, did not wake up one day and independently derive the idea to found one of the country’s greatest research universities (UChicago). It actually emerged from a network of Baptist educators and organizers, among them Frederick Taylor Gates, who would become Rockefeller’s principal philanthropic adviser. There are so many examples of this throughout history, from Walter Damrosch (the young conductor who pitched the idea for a great concert hall to Andrew Carnegie, and you know the rest) to George Grey Barnard, the sculptor and art collector whose collection formed the basis of the Met Cloisters (currently working on assembling what I hope will be a comprehensive list of such efforts). These were people capable either of converting a benefactor’s general desire to do something important into a specific institution, field, collection, research program, or public good, or simply of presenting them with an extraordinary idea worth backing. Which is all to say that patronage is often a team sport! Yes, the capital ultimately has to come from somewhere, but I really do believe now might be the best time in history to become the person a very wealthy person relies upon to understand a particular domain, or to create the kind of cultural institution that you believe is important. So yes, one interesting question is, “Where are the Carnegies?” But also…where are the Frederick Taylor Gateses?