My wife and I bought a nice house in a middle/slightly upper middle class neighborhood. Not many European cars, parents didn’t send their kids to private schools. Everyone was doing fine, but seemingly not rich.

One day, a neighbors kid (age 6) passed out. Went to the hospital and within a few days was diagnosed with brain cancer of a type that was pretty much a death sentence. He was given 6 months to live.

A week later there was the previously scheduled block party and Frank (single guy, mid 60s, quiet neighbor 6 houses down) shows up and overhears people talking about the neighbor kid with cancer.

He asked me if I had the parents phone number, which I did and gave it to him.

The next day Frank had flown the entire family on his private jet across the country to a research center in California to meet with his best friend / former college roommate who happened to be conducting cutting edge immunotherapy research (basically reprogramming your body’s cells to fight specific strains of cancer).

As it turns out, Frank, the quiet guy living down the street who drove a 7 year old Toyota Camry was worth $750M (he started a company in the 90s that was bought by Oracle in the early 2000s and made him ultra rich).

Fast forward 5 months. Frank had paid for the entire family to move to CA for treatment which cost him just over $2.2M out of pocket. The kid was in remission after some next level, Star Trek crazy medical treatment. For a family he didn’t even know. Amazingly enough that wasn’t the extent of it…

Come to find out, we all learned Frank was sponsoring orphans in the system in our state and paying for college or trade school educations for every single orphan in the system in the state and had been for 20 years. He had sent more than 1,500 orphans to college or a trade school of their choice, spending $230M to do so.

The quiet dude down the street driving an old Toyota. He died 2 years ago. Left all his money to his foundation to continue to send state orphans to college.

The world would a significantly better place if only a fraction of the world’s ultra wealthy followed his example.