The World Needs Your Great Work

Skip to content

Adele Erolsky/Palmengarten in Frankfurt.

Editor’s note: Nathaniel Koloc is a founding executive at Pardon, an institutional sponsor of Palladium Magazine. Palladium is editorially independent and welcomes submissions from highly-placed stakeholders across the strategic landscape.

The wheels of 21st century capitalism have turned very effectively for holders of private wealth. One sign of this is the rapid proliferation of family offices, as these are private institutions tasked with guarding and deploying private capital. A Deloitte study estimated that in 2024 there were around 8,000 single family offices globally, and forecasted that number to increase to nearly 11,000 by 2030. The total number of family office vehicles of various types is already roughly 35,000 globally, according to technology providers to such offices.

Data from UBS and Forbes indicates that roughly 250 people achieved billionaire status in the United States over the last decade. Even as much of this wealth has been generated from outcomes in the tech sector, it is reasonable to assume that ongoing rapid AI advances might further accelerate this trend as we start to see multibillion dollar exits from very small teams or even individuals.

Family offices, however structurally organized, are the most nimble of financial organizations. They are generally not beholden to the sort of corporate governance, mandates, and fiduciary obligations that public and private corporations are; they are beholden only to whatever governance mechanisms they have chosen for themselves.

Yet, despite this proliferation of private wealth with these degrees of freedom, we see surprisingly few expressions of wealth that actually make use of such freedom. Basically everything follows the same old playbook: funds that seek to beat the market are getting in on the private equity era and fighting for direct allocation in venture deals. Even most venture studios seek merely to replicate traditional market opportunity-finding and startup-building in-house. Similarly, most philanthropy is still, even when a net positive, effectively interchangeable—one prominent surname on a museum or a hospital wing might just as well be another.

What is conspicuously missing is a large number of “great works”—commercial, philanthropic, or other unusual projects—that only the person commissioning them could have created. Works such as these are a truly unique blend of their sponsor’s perspective, experiences, passions, and values. The intention, care, and effort great works are undertaken with is unmistakable. They carry a quality of heft and meaningfulness that most projects do not. They ask something of us, they invite us to reconsider our actions and to raise our aspirations. They stir our hearts.

While human history abounds with many examples of great works, such as the Medicis’ farsighted patronage of the arts, or Andrew Carnegie’s thousands of libraries, contemporary examples are much more sparse. This is especially surprising given the sheer scale of modern private wealth that presumably is available for such pursuits. The relatively few projects with great works qualities that we do see in recent times are tantalizing glimpses of what a world would look like with abundant creative deployment of capital that clearly expresses a unique point of view for public benefit.

Examples include Nat Friedman’s PlasticList project, an independent research initiative to test food products for microplastics and publicize the results, and his Vesuvius Challenge, which marshalled resources to support using AI to map the Herculaneum scrolls. The scrolls are a set of 1,800 Roman scrolls that were carbonized when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, making them impossible to read if not for advanced imaging techniques.

Institutional examples include the for-the-love-of-the-game artisanal publishing at Stripe Press, which ostensibly has nothing to do with their core business of building payment rails, but delights intellectuals with beautiful works, or the Berggruen Institute, which was founded in 2010 by a successful finance entrepreneur, converting his financial capital into intellectual innovation as a think tank pursuing unorthodox contemplation and global projects.

Some examples span an entire career or body of work of a single person. Stewart Brand comes to mind, as he’s had many unique projects over the years, from his Whole Earth Catalogue in the 1970s—just recently made available as a comprehensive archive via the Whole Earth Index, itself a great work and substantial undertaking—to his 10,000 year clock, an ambitious centerpiece project of the Long Now Foundation, for which Brand is Cofounder & President.

Smaller, everyday examples can sometimes be spotted in the wild, but are hard to generalize because each is bespoke. A good friend of mine self-publishes a seasonal magazine chronicling his adventures in the mountains of...