Tis The Season of Giving

Feeney was born in  New Jersey during the  Great Depression and came from a modest background of blue collar  Irish-American parents in  Elizabeth, New Jersey. His ancestry traces to  County Fermanagh in  Northern Ireland. He served as a U.S. Air Force radio operator during the  Korean War, and began his career selling  duty-free liquor to US naval personnel at Mediterranean ports in the 1950s .

He graduated from the  Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

He is known for his frugality. According to a   New York Times  article in 2017, "Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag. For many years, when in New York, he had lunch not at the city's luxury restaurants, but in the homey confines of ' Tommy Makem 's Irish Pavilion' on  East 57th Street , where he ate the burgers." As of 2016, he lived in a rented apartment in  San Francisco , with a remaining nest egg of $2 million.

The concept of "duty-free shopping"-offering high-end concessions to travelers, free of import taxes-was in its infancy when Feeney and his college classmate Robert Warren Miller started selling duty-free liquor to American servicemen in Asia in the 1950s.They later expanded to selling cars and tobacco, and founded the Duty Free Shoppers Group (DFS Group) on November 7, 1960.  

DFS eventually expanded to off-airport duty-free stores and large downtown Galleria stores, and became the world's largest travel retailer. By the mid-1990s, DFS was distributing profits of up to $300 million a year to Feeney, Miller, and two smaller partners. 

In 1982, Feeney created The Atlantic Philanthropies, and in 1984, secretly transferred his entire 38.75% stake in DFS, then worth about $500 million, to the foundation. Not even his business partners knew that he no longer personally owned any part of DFS.

For years, Atlantic gave away money in secret, requiring recipients to not reveal the sources of their donations. "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations--some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"

The largest single beneficiary of Feeney's giving is his alma mater  Cornell University, which has received nearly $1 billion in direct and Atlantic gifts, including a donation of $350 million enabling the creation of Cornell's  New York City Tech Campus.

In February 2011, Feeney became a signatory to  The Giving Pledge. In his letter to  Bill Gates and  Warren Buffett, the founders of The Giving Pledge, Feeney writes, "I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living-to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition. More importantly, today's needs are so great and varied that intelligent philanthropic support and positive interventions can have greater value and impact today than if they are delayed when the needs are greater."

He gave away his last $7 million in late 2016, to the same recipient of his first charitable donations: Cornell. Over the course of his life, he has given away more than $8 billion.

Charles Francis  "Chuck " Feeney  (born April 23, 1931)  is an  Irish - American  businessman and  philanthropist  and the founder of  The Atlantic Philanthropies , one of the largest private foundations in the world. He made his fortune as a co-founder of the  Duty Free Shoppers Group , which pioneered the concept of  duty-free shopping . Feeney gave away his fortune in secret for many years, until a business dispute resulted in his identity being revealed in 1997.  Over the course of his life, Feeney has given away more than $8 billion.