Giving back has been part of Michael Bloomberg’s life for as long he can remember. The former New York City mayor and financial-news company founder says his parents taught him that everyone has a responsibility to make the world a better place. He took that to heart as an Eagle Scout and in his early years at the financial-services firm Salomon Brothers, where he says philanthropy was part of the culture.
The donor backlash and MacKenzie Scott's no-strings giving didn't sway the country's biggest philanthropists.
Over decades as a prominent philanthropist, he has found that there is real joy in seeing the difference he has made.
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Giving back has been part of Michael Bloomberg’s life for as long he can remember. The former New York City mayor and financial-news company founder says his parents taught him that everyone has a responsibility to make the world a better place. He took that to heart as an Eagle Scout and in his early years at the financial-services firm Salomon Brothers, where he says philanthropy was part of the culture.
The donor backlash and MacKenzie Scott's no-strings giving didn't sway the country's biggest philanthropists.
Over decades as a prominent philanthropist, he has found that there is real joy in seeing the difference he has made.
“I’ve never understood people who wait until they die to give away their wealth. Why deny yourself the satisfaction?” he wrote in an email to the Chronicle. “I’ve been very lucky, and I’m determined to do what I can to open doors for others and to leave a better world for my children and grandchildren.”
For the second year in a row, Bloomberg tops our Philanthropy 50 list of the year’s biggest donors. This year, he gave a total of $3.7 billion to support arts, education, environment, and public-health groups, and to back programs aimed at improving city governments. He gives directly to charities and through his Bloomberg Philanthropies, which last year awarded a $1 billion grant to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to make medical school free and to provide financial aid to nursing and public-health students.
“Johns Hopkins took a chance on me, and the doors it opened led me to where I am today,” Bloomberg wrote. “I want to give more young people the chance that Hopkins gave me.”
Bloomberg was one of six donors who gave $1 billion or more in 2024. The others were Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin (No. 2), Michael and Susan Dell (No. 3), Warren Buffett (No. 4), Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg (No. 5), and Ruth Gottesman (No. 6). The majority of those gifts went to foundations and donor-advised funds that support causes including education, economic mobility, social justice, and scientific research. Gottesman, like Bloomberg, gave to make medical school free. She donated $1 billion to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Debates or Noise?
The year was marked by some big public debates about philanthropy. MacKenzie Scott’s streak of multimillion-dollar grants to nonprofits continued, bringing her total giving to $19.2 billion since 2019. Scott does not appear on the Philanthropy 50 list because she conducts her giving through donor-advised funds. While it’s possible she made gifts to one or more of those funds that would have earned her a spot on the Philanthropy 50, she and her representatives declined to provide such information to the Chronicle.
Melinda French Gates (No. 7) left the Gates Foundation last year, and in many of her media appearances, she made powerful arguments for the importance of philanthropy and her own focus on the empowerment of women and girls. Meanwhile, other donors — most notably hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman — pushed back against the institutions they have supported, criticizing universities’ response to the October 7 attacks in Israel and campus protests against the war in Gaza; critiquing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; demanding changes; and pledging to halt support.
Despite the uproar by Ackman and others, there isn’t much evidence that these calls for donors to abandon certain universities have affected their fundraising over the past year, says Brian Flahaven, vice president for strategic partnerships at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, which assists colleges and universities with alumni relations, communications, and fundraising.
“Beyond the high-profile cases, we haven’t heard that this has been widespread,” he says. “Regardless of their own political perspective, when donors are giving to institutions, there’s some mission-driven reason, whether it’s medical research, whether they had a great experience, or they are trying to give back in terms of financial aid.”
But some donors are loath to get ensnared in high-profile polarizing issues, says Renee Kaplan, CEO of the donor advisory firm Forward Global. As a result, she says, some donors are staying out of the fray by making anonymous donations. Others are working together in donor collaboratives, both to boost their power and resources and to shield individual contributors from criticism.
Donors are starting to say, “I’ll do more anonymously. I’m not going to put my name on things. I’m going to slow down our foundation for a while because I’m worried I’ll be a target,” Kaplan says. “I think there’s genuine concern and pause and fear that’s affecting donors.”
Other donors are pushing back against the criticism, says Stephanie Ellis-Smith, CEO of Phīla Engaged Giving, a philanthropic advisory firm. She says some donors who have been on the fence are starting to fund initiatives that address racial inequity, and others are expressing interest and are learning more.
This year Bloomberg gave $600 million through Bloomberg Philanthropies to support medical schools at historically Black colleges and universities, an important endorsement of those programs at schools that are often ignored by philanthropy and have small endowments to fall back on.
“The data shows that Black patients have better health outcomes when they’re seen by Black doctors, and about half of all Black doctors in the U.S. are graduates of the four Historically Black Medical Schools,” he wrote in an email to the Chronicle. “Our support is helping to reduce student debt at those schools, which helps more of their students graduate and become doctors.”
K. Lisa Yang (No. 34), left, with Ila Fiete, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Some philanthropists believe that politicized public debates about giving are unhelpful noise that can get in the way of doing effective work. K. Lisa Yang (No. 34), a retired investment banker, gave $74.5 million this year, much of that to MIT and Cornell University, where she is a trustee. Yang has long supported research collaboratives at Harvard and MIT, where she says the universities’ different strengths complement each other. In 2024, she gave $10 million to the Yang Tan Collective, which brings scientists and engineers together to work on human health and well-being, a program she has supported for eight years. She also gave $28 million to start the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering Research Center.
Researchers in these programs collaborate across disciplines to conduct disruptive high-risk, high-reward research. In one case, that collaboration contributed to the first CRISPR gene therapy for an autism-spectrum disorder. The FDA authorized clinical trials in 2024, and initial trial participants are receiving treatment in early 2025. Her gift to Cornell enables researchers to examine wildlife health and the interactions between people and wildlife that can lead to the spread of diseases like the H1N1 virus.
Environmental crises and neurological disorders are urgent issues that require timely and effective solutions — so Yang has little time for critics of these universities. She also supports diversity in the workplace by giving to a nonprofit that encourages employers to hire neurodiverse people.
Yang says she needed to find the institutions that have the best talent to encourage collaboration and to build communities of researchers that can work together in the long run. When it comes to neuroscience, she says, that is Harvard and MIT, two of the institutions at the center of last year’s donor revolt.
“The people who are suffering from these disorders, they don’t have the luxury of time,” she says. “When you have a rare disease and they do politics, to the people who are suffering from the disorder, it is totally irrelevant. They’re still suffering. I don’t want to get involved in that because then I can’t really focus on what’s important to the people who are suffering.”
Local Focus
Many of the ultra-high-net-worth donors who appear regularly on the Philanthropy 50 list are following giving strategies they developed a decade or more ago, says Alex Johnston, founding partner at Building Impact Partners, a philanthropy advisory firm. He says they’re not particularly swayed by the winds blowing one way or the other.
“Many donors are directing their philanthropy where their attention is already focused, where they already have connections, and where a gift is meaningful for them,” he says. “There’s some personal relevance that creates feelings of fulfillment when they make that gift.”
Often that involves local giving, Johnston says. Unlike other types of giving, donors can contribute to a community and causes they are familiar with and see the impact, sometimes in their daily lives.
That has been the case for Nancy and Richard Kinder (No. 37), who gave $60.02 million to their foundation in 2024. In 2011, the couple joined the Giving Pledge, which encourages wealthy people to commit to give at least half of their wealth to charity during their lifetimes or in their wills. Rather than giving a huge lump sum to their foundation and then doling out 5 percent of the endowment every year, the Kinders take a different approach. They keep enough money in the foundation to make sure they can cover all their obligations — in 2024, the foundation’s assets stood at $300.9 million. Then the couple put in additional money — about $50 million to $60 million each of the past several years — and the foundation gives out about the same amount that year.
The foundation’s grants can total in the tens of millions of dollars and are primarily focused on Houston, their hometown. The Kinders fund education and programs that aim to improve the quality of life for Houston residents, and they have been pivotal in the development of urban green space. This year, the Kinder Foundation gave $10 million to the Memorial Park Conservancy to support Memorial Groves, which educates the public about the 70,000 soldiers who trained there during World War I.
The couple has awarded more than $621 million since they began giving in the 1990s and plan to give about 95 percent of their wealth away.
“We’re big believers in philanthropy, and we’re hands-on,” Richard Kinder says. “We thought we could really make a difference if we concentrated our efforts here in Houston. We picked urban green space, education, and quality of life because we thought those were three areas that most of the philanthropies were not concentrating on.”
And they’re engaged donors. They often visit the parks that they have helped to support, and if a water fountain isn’t working or a light is broken, they are quick to call the director of their foundation and let him know.
“We really love Memorial Park. It’s a 3-mile trail. You see and hear every language,” Nancy Kinder says. “We just love to see people and dogs having fun.”
I’ve never understood people who wait until they die to give away their wealth. Why deny yourself the satisfaction?
The couple have a well-developed process for determining what projects to fund. For starters, they have several community members on the board of their foundation, a balance that will change after they pass away. It will shift from having three nonfamily members on the board to an even balance of five family members and five community members. Foundation staff members work closely with community groups to help identify needs and interests. They will not invest in a park project unless there is an entity, like a conservancy, that is funded to maintain it — something they often contribute to as well.
“We’re trying to have a foundation that both reflects the coming generations of the family, but also takes into account the people who are very familiar with Houston’s needs and with philanthropy,” Richard Kinder says. “We just think that’s a good balance to have.”
Both Kinders say that they don’t give much heed to the big debates going on in philanthropy — Richard says both Bill Ackman and Bill Gates are friends. But at least one of the projects they support feels prescient in today’s divisive political environment. In 2015, they provided $25 million to create the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri, Richard’s alma mater. The nonpartisan program includes liberal and conservative faculty and focuses on the ideas of the country’s founders. The goal is to better understand America’s democracy. In 2025, questions about the separation of powers and interpretation of the Constitution are driving everyday political discourse.
“People really do want to understand what our democracy is all about,” Richard Kinder says. “They really want to do it in a way that is not confrontational.”
Another Giving Spree
For all of the press that MacKenzie Scott’s giving has generated in recent years, it’s not clear that many other donors are taking note, says Johnston, the philanthropy adviser. It’s another reminder that philanthropy at the highest levels is not necessarily driven by trends that are in the press or discussed by fellow donors. Philanthropists do learn from each other, but once they are on their path, they often stick with it.
Illustration: Sean McCabe for The Chronicle. Images: Courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies; Caitlin Cunningham; Kinder Foundation; Jason Bell
From left, Michael Bloomberg, K. Lisa Yang, Richard and Nancy Kinder, and Melinda French Gates
“MacKenzie Scott’s giving has been such a dramatic example, received so much attention, and yet how many other donors have we heard about who are really at a big scale doing the same thing?” Johnston says. “That further underscores the personal nature of that approach. It is personally fulfilling, and it is creating a positive impact on the world. But it’s not the answer that others are necessarily arriving at.”
Of course, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Richard Kinder says the diversity of approaches is a core strength of philanthropy. “That’s the beauty of American philanthropy; you are giving free rein to pretty smart people doing creative things,” he says. “The fact that somebody else is interested in nothing but HIV or libraries or whatever. I think it’s up to each person.”
And even when some of these donors take somewhat similar approaches, they may have entirely different reasons for it.
Thomas Golisano (No. 8) gave away $500 million last year. Almost $400 million of that went to 123 nonprofits in New York and Florida with no strings attached. About 90 of those gifts were between $1 million and $5 million, often to small groups that rarely get such gifts. Many were to groups that serve people with developmental, intellectual, and physical disabilities. The issue has great meaning to Golisano, whose son has a developmental disability.
While making such large unrestricted gifts appears to be right out of the Scott playbook, Golisano says that her strategy didn’t influence his approach. Instead, he says, large unrestricted gifts are most beneficial to the nonprofits he wants to support.
“It was extremely rewarding. A lot of these gifts will be transformative for them,” he says of the nonprofits. “They can use their imagination and creativity to improve services or lower costs — whatever they decide to use it for.”
‘Boots on the Ground’
This year’s Philanthropy 50 included the largest number of gifts of a billion dollars or more — six — in the list’s 25-year history. In total, this year’s donors gave $16.2 billion — the 10th most in 25 years. But it’s clear that wealth accumulation among the country’s richest individuals is outpacing philanthropic giving. Today 180,000 ultra-high-net-worth Americans control nearly $21 trillion in assets, according to Wealth-X, an Altrata company. Johnston says that those people give away about 0.5 percent of their wealth every year.
Nineteen individuals, couples, or families on our list also appear on the Forbes 400 list. Those 19 donors have a combined net worth of $954 billion. Yet together they gave away $12.3 billion — only 1.3 percent of their combined wealth.
One of the reasons so much money may be on the philanthropic sidelines is that as donors contemplate giving larger and larger sums, they aren’t sure how to proceed. They want to better understand the results of their giving, Johnston says, but that requires more engagement, and sometimes help from experts.
“As the checks get larger, donors raise their own expectations about their ability to understand and track what’s happened to their giving, and that requires them to put some things in place that become a challenge, especially if they’ve become very wealthy but they haven’t actually created the time and space in their world for a significant amount of time to be spent on philanthropy,” he says. “I think that is a big reason why money sits on the sidelines.”
MacKenzie Scott’s giving has garnered a lot of attention, but there’s little evidence other donors are following suit.
Support from these wealthy donors is more important than ever, as nonprofits struggle to survive financially and federal funding is being halted or cut.
Many small international nonprofits that rely on U.S. government funds won’t survive, Kaplan says. In addition, she says, some foundations in this country are pulling back from democracy initiatives out of concern over the government’s changing definition of terrorism groups and because of the shift in power and ideology. All of that puts more pressure on individual donors.
Yang, the retired investment banker, says that given the uncertainty of federal support of scientific research, she needs to be even more involved with her philanthropy and the organizations she supports. She sits on scientific advisory boards of the programs she funds and makes sure to be an active member.
“Boots on the ground. That’s my approach,” Yang says. “It’s great to announce a big initiative. But the devil is in the details. My money should go as far as it can go.”
For some donors, this is also a time for thoughtful planning, says Ellis-Smith, the philanthropic adviser. Many countries are in the midst of significant political changes that will require more long-term strategic thinking. That’s especially true when it comes to philanthropy’s relationship with the government, where it has traditionally been a catalyst to spark funding from the government and to bridge holes.
“Philanthropy was meant to fund the gap left from government services,” she says. “But what if this funding gap that we always talk about becomes a canyon?”
Maria directs the annual Philanthropy 50, a comprehensive report on America’s most generous donors. She writes about wealthy philanthropists, arts organizations, key trends and insights related to high-net-worth donors, and other topics.
Jim Rendon is senior editor and fellowship director who covers nonprofit leadership, climate change, and philanthropic outcomes for the Chronicle. Email Jim or follow him on Twitter @RendonJim.
