Airbnb co-founder and billionaire Brian Chesky (No. 21) joined the Giving Pledge in 2016, when he was 34. He hoped his commitment to give away the bulk of his fortune would inspire others his age.

The 2022 Philanthropy 50: Who Gives the Most to Charity

Bill Gates gave $5.1 billion to his foundation last year to take the top spot in the Chronicle’s 23rd annual ranking of America’s biggest donors. Read more:

• Philanthropy 50
• Meet the ‘Everyday Megadonor’: 2022’s List of Top Philanthropists Includes a Host of New Names
• How Billionaires Found Joy With $1 Million Gifts to Small Nonprofits
• McPherson College Aimed to Bring Big Donors Into the Fold — and Won a $500 Million Pledge
• What’s Next for America’s Biggest Donors
• Philanthropy 50 Donors’ Giving to and From Their Foundations and Donor-Advised Funds in 2022
• 2022’s Top Donors: ‘Forbes 400' and ‘Giving Pledge’ Billionaires Who Gave Big
• 2022’s Top Donors: Where They Live, Where They Give, and More

“I didn’t want the Giving Pledge to be just a bunch of old people,” Chesky says. Nor did he want his initial philanthropy to be “abstract.”

Last year, Chesky made the biggest single gift of his fledgling philanthropy career: a $100 million contribution to the Obama Foundation. Despite his relative youth and brash entrepreneurial style, it went to a decidedly old-school cause: college scholarships and support for students interested in public service. “I wanted to make, at least for my first donations, an impact on people’s lives that I could see,” Chesky says. He enjoys meeting scholarship recipients and the “immediate feedback.”

Chesky is not the only megadonor with this mind-set. People like to give to people, giving experts say, and that was certainly true for the Philanthropy 50 in 2022.

Many of the 50 largest donors of 2022 cast an eye to the future yet hewed closely to decades-old conventions of charitable giving, according to the Chronicle’s analysis of their donations. At least 14 earmarked contributions to scholarships for high-school or college students — a type of gift that dates back at least 1,000 years, according to researchers at the Council for the Support and Advancement of Education, or CASE.

Ten made donations of at least $10 million to support research on cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases that have stymied medicine — and attracted philanthropists hunting answers — for decades.

‘The Next Obamas’

The donors’ focus on the future may stem from the suddenness with which the pandemic and racial reckoning turned society upside down, says Trista Harris, a former foundation leader who now runs FutureGood, a consultancy. “We had to throw away our strategic plan because none of it works anymore.” Donors recognized “that there might be even bigger change around the corner, and it’s my responsibility to understand what those possibilities are.”

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (No. 25) is putting $50 million toward what he calls a “cyber civil defense” to counter escalating digital threats to individuals, communities, and countries. “My time frame is the next couple centuries, assuming we don’t go extinct,” he says.

Chesky, through his gift to the Obama Foundation, wants to build a leadership cadre modeled on the former president. The two met through Obama-administration entrepreneurship programs and grew to be friends. “When he left office, he kind of became a mentor to me,” Chesky says. “At one point, we had a standing weekly call.”

“If we could find the next Obamas — the next generation of leaders — that would change the world,” he adds.

Thorny Problems

If the giving of the Philanthropy 50 is a picture of traditional philanthropy, so, too, are the donors. It is again a male-dominated group, with only one person of color: Taiwanese American Jen-Hsun Huang, who debuted on the list with his wife, Lori, at No. 41, tied with two other donors..

Some philanthropy observers applaud the generosity of the Philanthropy 50 but worry that the donors are not addressing the country’s biggest problems, particularly climate change and racial equity. Donations by last year’s 50 biggest donors toward climate-change mitigation and solutions, for instance, reached only $195 million — 10 times less than the more than $2 billion directed to scholarships and disease prevention. Only a handful of gifts aimed at closing racial disparities.

“The default setting for the biggest donors still seems to be to steer away from addressing some of the thorniest societal challenges related, for example, to inequity, racism, and the future of our planet,” says Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy.

After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 and resulting nationwide protests, a number of major philanthropists stepped forward to learn about racial justice and understand what they could do, says Crystal Hayling, executive director of the Libra Foundation, which is leading a $45 million effort funded by 15 major philanthropies to support small, Black-led racial-justice organizations. (Google billionaires Eric and Wendy Schmidt [No. 29] and the family of Bay Area real-estate developers John and Sue Sobrato [No. 15] contribute to the work through their charitable-giving vehicles.)

Now, Hayling says, there’s a reversion to the mean. “Conversation is moving back to a place that’s a little bit more comfortable for people of wealth. They say, ‘Let’s just talk about equal opportunity, job pipelines, and improving schools.’ Those things are important, but they can be slightly evasive of really addressing the issue of racial justice.”

Where’s MacKenzie?

The Chronicle’s analysis doesn’t capture the full range of megaphilanthropy. Novelist and high-profile philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, who’s not on this year’s Philanthropy 50, has donated some $14 billion to individual charities since 2020, with a significant share going to racial-justice organizations. It’s likely that Scott made gifts to her donor-advised funds that would have earned her a spot on the ranking, but she and her representatives declined to provide information to the Chronicle. Melinda French Gates, another big-name donor, also did not share such information.

Also, while the Philanthropy 50 ranking includes donors’ contributions to their personal foundations and donor-advised funds, the Chronicle’s analysis of gifts doesn’t include grants from those entities. Major philanthropists such as Bill Gates (No. 1) and John and Laura Arnold (No. 6) made gifts to restock their foundations, which in turn address such tough issues as criminal justice, climate change, strengthening democracy, and racial equity.

“We’re seeing a rise in giving that’s trying to deal with very complicated and difficult systems” that may not be reflected in the Philanthropy 50’s gift analysis, says Melissa Berman, CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Outside the Philanthropy 50, tech venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife, Ann, donated $1.1 billion from their foundation to launch a school for sustainability study at Stanford. Entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick also pledged $50 million from their family fund to the University of California at Davis to create a center for agriculture and environmental sustainability.

Overall, support of climate-change efforts is growing, according to research by ClimateWorks Foundation. New donors are stepping up, and longtime donors are accelerating their giving, albeit often through university research.

“Donors — particularly the new donors coming into climate — are coming in any way they can,” says Irene Kim, vice president for development at ClimateWorks. Often, “they’re coming into where they know, which is higher education.”

Efforts to preserve nature also are attracting increasing support. “It feels a little bit easier to relate to,” Kim says. “Nature is a little bit closer to what people see and interact with themselves.”

Giving by the Philanthropy 50 reflects these trends, Kim says. Five Philanthropy 50 donors committed eight-figure gifts to finding solutions to climate change. The largest was $60 million that Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne (No. 33), pledged to the University of California at Santa Barbara for ocean science.

The Huangs donated $50 million to help start a research center at Oregon State, their alma mater, to apply artificial intelligence to climate science. The Huangs, who are tech billionaires, previously gave $30 million to Stanford’s engineering school but say philanthropy has to invest beyond the elite institutions.

“We really want to invest and democratize this and introduce this capability into more universities so that every computer scientist can engage in artificial intelligence and apply it to solving these challenging problems,” Jen-Hsun says.

Scholarship Boom

The growing number of gifts Philanthropy 50 donors made for educational financial aid aligns with broader giving data from CASE. That trend was set in motion in part by high-profile donations such as the $1.8 billion contribution that Michael Bloomberg (No. 3) pledged to Johns Hopkins University in 2018 for financial aid, according to CASE president Sue Cunningham.

The pandemic-related trials of students also spurred giving, Cunningham says. “The refocusing on student need was palpable.”

A few scholarship gifts were explicitly tied to equity and diversity. John Schreiber, a retired real-estate executive, and his wife, Kathy (No. 17), gave $100 million to Loyola University Chicago for scholarships to Black, Latino, first-generation, and other ethnically and racially diverse students. John Metz, a retired New York City employee-relations executive, and his husband, Ali Khan (No. 44), made a planned bequest of $46 million to Miami University of Ohio, Metz’s alma mater, for scholarship aid to students eligible for the federal Pell Grant for low-income families.

The Obama Foundation

The cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder (No. 14) gave $177 million to the University of Pennsylvania and Hunter College to address nursing shortages by recruiting students from underrepresented backgrounds and training more providers for disadvantaged communities.

Outside higher education, lawyer and business executive Adrienne Arsht (No. 32) addressed diversity with a $11 million gift to her namesake performing-arts center in Miami to provide full salaries to interns. Paid positions make the potentially career-changing opportunities more available to students of all income levels and will help change the predominantly white management ranks in the arts, Arsht says.

During the Depression, her father, Samuel Arsht, attended the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and was invited to join the law review. He was forced to decline; as the son of Eastern European immigrants working his way through school, he didn’t have the time.

That experience led Arsht to make a $5 million gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2020 to pay its interns. A paid intern program was one of the museum’s responses to the police murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. “I called and said, ‘I’m funding your interns. Done.’”

Scholarships and paid internships are needed, but they empower individuals, not whole communities, Hayling says. “We need more tools than just those because we’re really trying to raise the floor — the entire floor — not just skim the cream off the top.”