Billion-Dollar Gifts by Bezos and Bloomberg Top List of Biggest Donations in 2018

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It was a healthy year for big gifts in 2018, with two donations hitting or exceeding the $1 billion mark. Those gifts came from two of America’s wealthiest entrepreneurs — Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Michael Bloomberg, who founded his financial-news business, Bloomberg L.P.

Both gifts sought to benefit people in need.

Bezos’s donation created the Day One Fund, which he established in September to help homeless families and create a new network of nonprofit preschools in low-income communities. Bloomberg’s gift to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, through his Bloomberg Philanthropies will boost financial aid for low- and middle-income students.

The Chronicle’s annual top-10 list of the largest gifts announced by individuals or their foundations was impressive throughout, but it was a steep fall from the previous year — even though the 2018 list actually includes 12 gifts because of ties. The total in 2018 was a little less than $5.8 billion, a 43.5 percent drop from the $10.2 billion total in 2017.

Many of the contributions on the 2018 list went to well-established institutions, with half of them going to universities.

Education Boost

Bezos’s and Bloomberg’s billion-dollar gifts were followed by a $375 million donation from Bloomberg through his Bloomberg Philanthropies for two new programs, American Talent Initiative and CollegePoint, established to improve education by preparing U.S. students to enter college or the work force.

Stephen Schwarzman, a New York financier, gave the fourth-largest gift, $350 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a hub to integrate the study of computer science, artificial intelligence, data science, and related fields across MIT’s five schools, with an emphasis on new discoveries and the ethical application of artificial intelligence.

Education may also get a boost from Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $213.6 million gift, the fifth-biggest on the list. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave the money to their donor-advised fund, which has primarily supported education, health, and other programs in previous years.

That gift was followed by two $200 million donations. One, from corporate-turnaround specialist Jay Alix, went toward the Mayo Clinic’s endowment and will back scholarships and a professorship. The other $200 million contribution was from investor Len Blavatnik through his Blavatnik Family Foundation. Blavatnik pledged the money to Harvard Medical School for a number of research programs.

Artificial Intelligence

Two gifts of $125 million apiece from Paul Allen, who died in October, supported big, new research programs. The donation he made to his Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence created Project Alexandria, a new research effort on common sense for artificial intelligence. He started the institute in 2014. His other donation of $125 million went to the Allen Institute, which focuses on bioscience, to launch an immunology division. He established this institute in 2003 to house research efforts in cell and brain science.

A gift of stock valued at nearly $1 billion that Nike co-founder Phil Knight gave an unnamed charity was not included on the list because Knight would not confirm if it went to his foundation and if it was a new gift or money he planned to use to pay off a series of nine-figure pledges he has announced in recent years.

The Chronicle’s annual rankings are based on the 10 biggest publicly announced gifts. The tally does not include contributions of artwork or gifts from anonymous donors.

In February, the Chronicle will unveil its annual ranking of the 50 biggest donors, a list based on individuals’ total contributions in 2018, not single gifts.

Biggest Gifts by Individuals or Their Foundations