With William Ackman’s $1 Billion Gift, 2021 Is Getting Off to a Good Start for Philanthropy

The billionaire investor William Ackman said in a tweet on Monday that he gave all of the shares he owned in a South Korean company, worth about $1 billion, to three nonprofits, including his Pershing Square Foundation, a donor-advised fund, and another charity he declined to name. The money comes from his stake in Coupang, an e-commerce company whose stock soared after it went public last week.

The announcement Ackman made on Monday is the biggest and latest uptick in ultra-high-net-worth giving since the beginning of the year and may signal good news for nonprofits seeking big sums after 2020’s tough fundraising climate.

In February, Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk and the geneticist Arthur Riggs each donated $100 million to nonprofits. Musk supported the X Prize while Riggs’s dollars went to City of Hope. Meanwhile, Sue Ann Arnall, a lawyer and energy company executive, gave $85 million through her foundation this week to the Oklahoma City Community Foundation to back charities working to help children and families caught up in the child-welfare and criminal-justice systems; and Helene Houle, a St. Paul, Minn. philanthropist gave $60 million to the Mayo Clinic this week for a wing in its Rochester, Minn., hospital. The casino magnate Steve Wynn announced last week a $50 million donation to Mohawk Valley Health System in Upstate New York.

Slow Start to Giving

Bill Ackman caught the philanthropy world’s eye in 2010 when he gave $58 million to his foundation, which he started in 2006 to back a range of causes such as education, human rights, social entrepreneurship. He landed the No. 17 spot on that year’s Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors. He said at the time that he planned to give away most of his wealth to charity, but up until now, he had been a fairly quiet donor.

An activist investor and hedge-fund founder who is known for shaking things up in the high-finance world, Ackman’s net worth stands at about $3 billion, according to Forbes. Through his foundation, he has backed charities like DonorsChoose, the Center for Jewish History, the Innocence Project, and Human Rights Watch, among others.