Close enuf. Billionaires have access.to information. And who knows nowadays what’s relevant. Charity is fine, and the above.goes. Billionaires or.anyone for that matter will only act in crisis where their own survival is at stake. I was going to list all of the billionaires so good acts, and some of them are commandible, but some are merely to yawn at, for the most part the trusts in favor of a guaranteed succession of powers take precedence
The rest result in tax writeoffs and other goodies.
What we have for dinner, freedom or slavery if that was Your intended forum, may be interesting though, cross economic borders.
I will list billionaire charities down the line when I have more quality time.
Here it is lists of those who gave most and least, by Forbes:
The New Forbes 400 Philanthropy Score: Measuring Billionaires’ Generosity
Deniz CamForbes Staff
I cover the world’s richest people
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For the first time, Forbes 400 members are ranked not just on their total wealth and on how self-made they are, but also on their generosity. Members of this elite club have been scored on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most philanthropic. List members about whom we could find no charitable giving information received an N.A. (not available).
To come up with the scores, we first estimated each list member’s total lifetime giving. A team of 32 Forbes journalists delved into public filings, from tax forms for private foundations to press releases, and reached out to 400 members and nonprofits as well. Next we looked at what percent of their fortune they had given away. We weighted these two factors equally and scored people accordingly.
Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several other factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, whether they had pledged significant donations, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving and how quickly and effectively their private foundations distributed dollars. In a few instances, we also used some lifetime-giving information from Boca Raton-based firm SHOOK Research. We did not make a qualitative evaluation of the 400 members’ charitable gifts. We didn’t count pledges or announced gifts that have yet to be paid out. That’s why the world’s richest person Jeff Bezos is ranked a 2 out of 5 and not higher. Had the Amazon founder immediately distributed the $2 billion he pledged in September to help homeless families and start preschools, his score would have been a 4.
2018 Forbes 400 Philanthropy Scores ChartFORBES 2018
Only 29 of America’s 400 richest were given the highest possible score. To get to that recognition, a person had to give away at least $1 billion and/or 20% of their total net worth. There were 36 people, for instance, who gave away $1 billion who didn’t get the top score and another three who gave away less than $1 billion but still earned a score of 5. Notable top givers include Bill Gates, who has donated $35.8 billion to his charitable foundation, more than anyone else in the world; that figure is 27% of his fortune as of September 7, 2018, the day we locked in net worths for the Forbes 400. (To calculate giving as a percent of net worth, we added the value of the gift to the September 2018 net worth and then divided lifetime giving into that amount.)
In percentage terms, George Soros has donated more than any other Forbes 400 member. In 2017, Soros shifted $18 billion from his Soros Management Fund to his philanthropic network, Open Society Foundations. The move brought Soros’ lifetime giving to a total of $32 billion, or 79% of his wealth. Since its inception in 1993, Open Society Foundations distributed $14 billion to a variety of organizations, including UN Women, Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, the Roma Education Fund, and the Civil Liberties Union for Europe. In April 2018, Soros, who fled his home country Hungary during World War II, launched a $10 million emergency assistance fund to help Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar during an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Nike cofounder Phil Knight and former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer each received a score of 4. Though each has given away more than $1 billion, those gifts were less than 20% of their net worth. In contrast, hedge fund manager Steve Mandel, whose lifetime giving Forbesestimates at $690 million, has donated more than 20% of his fortune to causes like reversing climate change and education equity. Three AirBnB cofounders—Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk—received a 2; their publicly-disclosed giving so far is minimal, in large part because their company is private, but all three have signed the Giving Pledge and made clear they will be active philanthropists. Seventy-six of the list members received a score of 1, including President Donald Trump, meaning they gave away less than $30 million or less than 1% of their fortune to date. In June, the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2.8 million plus penalties for allegedly using the foundation as a tool for his business and his presidential campaign. His lawyers say the case is politically motivated. (Editor’s Note: Elon Musk was erroneously included as 1 when Forbes first published the list; In 2015 Musk, who signed the Giving Pledge, gave 1.2 million Tesla shares worth $254 million to his foundation)
Some billionaires worked with Forbes; others refused to cooperate, citing privacy concerns and/or religious beliefs. Others disagreed with our efforts and our methodology. “The new philanthropy ranking is fundamentally flawed, in that it is biased in favor of those who make their gifts widely known, and against donors who choose to make their charitable contributions anonymously,” one current Forbes 400 member (who did not wish to be named) argued via email.
We acknowledge that some of our lifetime giving estimates may be low because of a lack of transparency, since it’s possible to make charitable gifts anonymously. However, the spirit of the project harks back to an anecdote that Bill Gates shared at The Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy in 2014. “One of the [Middle Eastern magnates] mentioned that in the Qur’an, it actually says the reason to talk about your philanthropy is [that] it encourages other people to do the same,” he said. “In that case, you have an obligation to talk about your philanthropy.” We agree, and hope to spark more conversation about the nation’s richest and their commitment to the public good.
© 2019 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved
Trump And Other Billionaires Who Scored As Stingiest Members Of Forbes 400
Room for improvement: A significant number of billionaires on our list have little to show when it comes to philanthropy.
How do the richest Americans do when it comes to giving away their money to charity? Let’s put it this way: Not every billionaire is eager to share their good fortune.
While many of the nation’s wealthiest people are exceedingly generous — by Forbes’ calculations, 36 members of The Forbes 400 have given away at least $1 billion or more over their lifetimes — there are a significant number of stingy billionaires who, to the best Forbes could find, have given away next to nothing in their lifetimes.
For the first time this year, we scored each member of The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans on how generous (or not) they are with their money. We found that a perhaps surprising number are tight-fisted, despite their financial wherewithal. Seventy-six billionaires (or nearly a fifth of our list members) earned the lowest-possible philanthropy score of one, which means they have given away less than $30 million or under 1% of their fortune in their lifetimes.
For some it is quite intentional. One plain-spoken billionaire is blunt about his disavowal of philanthropy. Ken Fisher, who founded Fisher Investments with $250 in 1979 and now manages some $96 billion in assets, says he is “not a fan of philanthropy.” He’s not terribly interested in volunteering his time, either, and has said that sitting on the board of a nonprofit would be “distracting.” (Even still, Forbes found that he has made at least $11.5 million in donations over the years.)
Archie Aldis “Red” Emmerson, who made a fortune in timber and is the nation’s third-largest landowner, has made similar comments. When his kids gave Oregon State University $6 million to build a forestry lab and name it in his honor, he quipped: “That’ll take you all the way to the poor farm. Better not do it very often.”
Another high-profile billionaire has been sued over his philanthropy. In 1987, President Donald Trump started the Donald J. Trump Foundation and indicated he would give away profits from his book, The Art of the Deal. However, over the next 30 years, the foundation became a vehicle for self-promotion, in which he took donations from others and distributed the money as if it were his own. In June 2018, New York’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Trump, seeking $2.8 million plus penalties for allegedly using the foundation as a tool for his business and his 2016 presidential run. His lawyers responded by saying the suit is politically motivated.
Other times the nonprofits are the ones that want nothing to do with the billionaires. Former owner of the L.A. Clippers Donald Sterling has run into trouble with at least one institution that didn’t want his money. In 2014, following the airing of racist remarks that were caught on tape, UCLA returned a $425,000 donation and rejected the remainder of a $3 million pledge that Sterling had made to support basic kidney research at the university. Not that he was all that generous anyway. Sterling started his foundation in 2006, the same year he was sued by the Department of Justice for allegedly refusing to rent to African-Americans, but had put just $4 million into the charitable vehicle as of the end of 2016. That amounts to just 0.001% of his estimated $3.6 billion fortune.
There are plenty more billionaires who simply do not appear to have made philanthropy a priority. Many of them either lack a foundation altogether or have started a foundation and not done much with it. Some have publicized a gift here or there, as evidence of their philanthropy, but the donations don’t add up to much.
Take Stan Kroenke, a real estate and sports mogul who owns the L.A. Rams. He is the 58th richest person in the country but Forbes could only find traces of a single donation. In 2017, he and his wife Ann Walton Kroenke (a niece of Walmart founder Sam Walton) donated $1 million to the Red Cross in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. The Rams have a foundation, in which they support local youth organizations, but it relies on donations from others. It’s possible, however, that Kroenke prefers to give anonymously. His spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Andy Beal, a Texas banker with a fortune estimated at $9.9 billion, also doesn’t appear to have given away much. He describes on his website a $1 million donation to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and “millions” more to colleges and charity sponsorships, as well as to prizes for science and math education. That is peanuts, relatively speaking, for a man who collected over $650 million in dividends from his banks just in 2017.
Sometimes the lack of giving is tied to the age of the billionaire or how recently they’ve made their fortunes. Some frankly are just getting started and can be expected to ramp up their philanthropy in coming years. For instance, Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston, 35, took his cloud storage company public in March, then promptly donated $5 million to a new foundation. Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel, 28, completed an IPO in 2017 and has also pledged to donate as many as 13 million Class A shares to a new foundation over the next two decades. So far, he has donated just shy of one million shares, worth roughly $10 million, according to regulatory filings. (Meanwhile, his cofounder Bobby Murphy, 30, has donated 3.3 million shares, equivalent to $54 million, and was thus given a higher philanthropy score.)
We acknowledge that some scores may be too low because we do not have a complete picture of a billionaire’s charitable giving. While many people have long been public with their philanthropy or opted to share details of their giving with Forbes, there are others who have remained anonymous or declined to cooperate with us.
To come up with the philanthropy scores, a team of 32 Forbes journalists delved into public filings and reached out to 400 members and nonprofits in an effort to estimate lifetime giving. We also looked at what percent of their fortune they had given away. We weighted these two factors equally and scored people accordingly. Some individuals were then bumped up or down based on several factors, including whether they had signed the Giving Pledge, how personally involved they were in their charitable giving and how quickly their private foundations distributed dollars.
Read more: The New Forbes 400 Philanthropy Score: Measuring Billionaires’ Generosity
© 2019 Forbes Media LLC. All Rights Reserved