$1.7 billion earmarked for philanthropy: the challenges of 52-year-old entrepreneur Pierre-Edouard Sterin, who wants to give it all away

Recently, Pierre-Edouard Sterin appeared before France’s Senate — not to defend himself, not to lobby for a tax break, and not to seek any advantage that a man of his considerable stature might ordinarily pursue from a legislature.

He was there, in essence, to ask permission to be generous.

Speaking by video link, the 52-year-old entrepreneur and billionaire made a case that would have been unremarkable in New York or London, but in Paris it landed as almost radical: he wants to give every last dollar of his fortune to charity, and the law, as it stands, will not let him.

“I would like to give my entire estate to philanthropic causes,” he told the senators, quietly but without hesitation.

“I’m in favor of being able to do whatever one wants to do with one’s patrimony.”

It was a statement of principle as much as intent — the declaration of a man who has spent the better part of a decade reimagining what wealth is actually for.

Sterin’s story begins, as so many great fortunes do, with a simple idea executed brilliantly. Born in 1974, he came of age in France during an era when entrepreneurship was not yet the celebrated vocation it would become, and his early years in business were marked by setbacks that separated the eventually successful from the merely ambitious.

The breakthrough came with Smartbox, the gift experience company he co-founded that transformed the concept of giving into something experiential and memorable—not a product under wrapping paper, but an adventure, a dinner, or a weekend escape.

Smartbox became a continental phenomenon, a European market leader whose distinctive boxes became shorthand for the thoughtful gift across France, Belgium, Spain, and beyond.

The fortune it generated, now estimated at approximately $1.7 billion, gave Sterin a platform that most dreamers never reach. What sets him apart is what he chose to do with it.

He did not retire to a château. He did not merely write checks. Instead, he began to architect something more ambitious—a comprehensive philanthropic ecosystem that would, he hoped, change the culture of giving in France the way a generation of American visionaries had changed it in the United States.

In 2017, he co-founded La Nuit du Bien Commun—The Night of the Common Good—an annual fundraising gala that borrowed some of the theatrical energy of a TED Talk and the competitive spirit of an investment pitch.

Charities presented their missions to a room full of potential donors, making their case in real time, competing not for prizes but for the kind of attention that leads to lasting support.

Since its founding, La Nuit du Bien Commun has raised approximately $34 million for causes ranging from training guide dogs for the visually impaired to providing housing for vulnerable single mothers—causes notable not for their glamour but for their quiet, enduring human impact.

By 2021, Sterin had formalized his vision into the Fonds du Bien Commun, the Common Good Fund, his primary philanthropic vehicle and the vessel into which he has effectively poured his life’s work.

The Fonds is a remarkable construction, blending the functions of an endowment, an investment fund, a real estate platform, and a startup studio, echoing the innovative structures pioneered by major American foundations.

Today the Fonds deploys approximately $87 million per year in a combination of donations and equity investments and has backed more than 200 projects.

The breadth of its commitments tells a story about the man behind it: Catholic boarding schools in underserved communities — the first of 50 planned — alongside programs addressing poverty, social fragility, and the particular vulnerabilities of those whom prosperity has left behind. These are not vanity causes.

They are chosen with the deliberate eye of someone who has thought seriously about where a dollar of philanthropic capital creates the most lasting good.\

Sterin has spoken openly of his admiration for the American model of charitable giving and, with unusual candor, has said that he dreams of one day relocating to the United States.

The aspiration makes a certain sense. America is the country that embedded modern philanthropy into its cultural DNA—where Andrew Carnegie declared it a disgrace to die rich, where Bill Gates and Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge in 2010 and saw more than 250 of the world’s wealthiest individuals commit the majority of their fortunes to charitable causes; and where others demonstrated that a single private fortune, strategically deployed, could reshape institutions and shift the arc of civil society.

Sterin’s vision is cut from precisely this cloth.

His Fonds du Bien Commun is, in spirit if not yet in legal form, his answer to that tradition—a French billionaire’s attempt to prove that one person’s extraordinary accumulation of wealth can be returned, in full, to the world that made it possible.

That return, however, requires a legal reform that France has not yet made. At the heart of Sterin’s Senate appearance was a collision between personal vision and a centuries-old provision of the Napoleonic civil code: la réserve héréditaire, the protected inheritance share that guarantees children a fixed minimum portion of their parent’s estate, regardless of any will or expressed wish.

With five children, Sterin is legally bound to leave at least three-quarters of his assets to his family.

Only one quarter is freely disposable. In the United States and the United Kingdom, an individual may leave the entirety of an estate to charitable causes—it is a matter of personal sovereignty, enshrined in testamentary freedom. In France, that freedom does not fully exist, and for a man who has committed himself to the proposition that his fortune belongs not to his heirs but to the common good, the gap between intention and law is an acute frustration.

His argument before the Senate was not about punishing his children or making a philosophical statement about inheritance in the abstract. It was the straightforward plea of a philanthropist who has already, in effect, given his fortune away—to a fund, to a mission, to a set of causes he believes in—and who simply wants the law to reflect the choice he has already made in his heart. There is something both poignant and clarifying about a billionaire standing before legislators not to ask for more, but to ask for the right to give everything up.

What Sterin represents, at this particular moment, is a challenge to a culture. France has historically been a nation where philanthropy occupies a narrower lane in public life than it does in the United States—where the state has traditionally assumed the role of social provider and where private generosity, however admirable, has not carried quite the same civic weight. Sterin wants to change that.

The scale of his Fonds du Bien Commun, the invention of La Nuit du Bien Commun as a kind of philanthropic theater, and his willingness to appear before the Senate and make himself personally accountable to the question of what wealth is for all point toward a man who sees himself not merely as a donor but as a catalyst.

He is trying, in the grand tradition of major American philanthropists, to normalize a powerful idea: that a fortune is a trust, not a trophy, and that the highest use of extraordinary wealth is its extraordinary return to the world.

Whether French law will ultimately bend to accommodate that vision remains to be seen.

What is already certain is that Sterin has done something rarer than accumulating $1.7 billion.

He has decided, clearly and publicly and at real legal cost to himself, that he does not want to keep it.