PHILADELPHIA Billionaires aim to spend all of fortune on charities

The couple has already pledged millions to some colleges.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- In the past four years, H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest and his wife, Marguerite, have given away about a third of their $1 billion fortune, and they say they are far from through.
After spending four decades building immense wealth in cable television, the Lenfests are charting a course to spend it all on charity in much less time than they took to become one of America's wealthiest couples.
If all goes well, their children -- who have wealth of their own -- will get nothing, and the foundations that survive them will have spent every penny within 20 years of their deaths.
Gerry Lenfest, 73, said he decided the bulk of the family's fortune should not end up in a long-lasting endowment.
"During your lifetime, you can direct how your wealth is spent for the most good," he said. "But after your death, it is problematic. You don't have the control."
The answer, he said, is to spend the money up front.
So far, the couple have given or pledged about $325 million of their earnings from the sale of the cable business the family began building in 1974.
Earning the money
Lenfest was a successful lawyer and an executive at Triangle Publications when he borrowed $2.3 million to buy a small cable television system in Lebanon, Pa.
When he sold the system to Comcast Corp. in 2000, it had grown to 1.2 million subscribers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
The sale netted the Lenfest family about $1.2 billion.
The question then became how to spend it.
Beneficiaries in recent years have included Columbia University, Wilson College and Washington and Lee University, which all received gifts of between $16 million and $18 million.
The family has given or pledged $17.4 million to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and $15 million to help the Barnes Foundation move its extraordinary suburban art gallery to Philadelphia's museum district.
As to leaving the money for future generations of Lenfests, the couple decided against it.
"There is no challenge in life when you are born rich," Gerry Lenfest said.