A tech podcast inspired AI workers to donate $40 million to improve the lives of chickens, pigs, and other factory-farmed animals

Lewis Bollard has spent a decade begging philanthropists to care about chickens and pigs stuck in cages, and for most of that decade the checks were modest. Then, in August 2025, he sat down for an hour with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel and something shifted. The two argued that industrial farming is one of the great overlooked cruelties of modern life, and that it gets pennies compared to what flows toward climate change or global health. Patel apparently took the argument personally.

Within weeks he'd launched a fundraising push through FarmKind, a nonprofit built to chip away at factory farming, and put up a $250,000 matching pledge of his own money. Donors burned through it in under 48 hours — faster than FarmKind's cofounder Thom Norman says he expected. The campaign eventually pulled in $2.3 million, with another $200,000 trickling in from repeat donors since. Patel and Bollard didn't stop at online fundraising, either; they started hosting dinners inside AI labs, including OpenAI, to talk animal welfare directly with the engineers building the next wave of models.

The numbers matter because of who's writing the checks. Bollard, who leads farm animal work at Coefficient Giving, told Forbes that younger AI money behaves differently than old money — a 26-year-old engineer will sign a seven-figure check without the hand-wringing a hedge fund veteran might do. And there's a lot more of that money coming. Forbes estimates roughly $300 billion in fresh wealth could pour out of the AI boom into philanthropy over the coming years, eventually generating something like $30 billion a year in giving. Unlike prior tech fortunes, this generation isn't waiting for retirement to start donating — Bank of America Private Bank found donors under 43 are twice as likely to fundraise among friends and four times as likely to mentor other givers.

For a cause as underfunded as farm animal welfare, that shift could be seismic. Norman points out that the entire global movement has historically operated on less money in a year than McDonald's makes in two weeks. Even a modest redirection of AI wealth could dwarf everything animal advocates have raised before.

Not everyone in the billionaire class is convinced philanthropy even works, though. Elon Musk has said giving money away effectively is brutally hard, and that it's easy to look generous while accomplishing nothing real. Peter Thiel has gone further, telling the New York Times he's urged Giving Pledge signers — Musk included — to walk back their commitments, dismissing the whole effort as a relic. That tension, old-guard skepticism versus young-money enthusiasm, may end up shaping how much of that coming $300 billion actually reaches causes like Bollard's, and how much just sits.