Bill Gates, the world’s 12th richest person, has largely stayed quiet about his political giving until this year.
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After emphasizing bipartisanship and staying away from big political donations for decades, Bill Gates recently donated about $50 million to the nonprofit arm of a super PAC supporting Kamala Harris, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. He’s far from the only billionaire to do so.
found 13 other billionaires who’ve donated to the same super PAC, Future Forward. Five of them have done so since Harris announced her candidacy at the end of July. They include Facebook cofounder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, blockchain billionaire Chris Larsen, private equity titan Jim Coulter and Hyatt Hotels heir Daniel Pritzker. Altogether, the 13 billionaires have donated $50 million to Future Forward this election cycle.
Unlike Gates’ reported gift, these billionaires’ donations are public because they gave directly to the Future Forward PAC, a committee that’s been around since 2018 and promotes Democratic candidates primarily through advertising. The PAC had previously supported Biden, but all of the funding the president had raised passed to Harris when he dropped out of the race.
Gates’ donation went to Future Forward through its “dark money” affiliate, a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors but can in turn donate to the Future Forward PAC. Gates had intended to keep the donation a secret, per the New York Times, and told the Times that he has “a long history of working with leaders across the political spectrum, but this election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world.” It’s possible that other billionaires have also donated to Future Forward through its dark money arm, which has funneled to the super PAC more than $50 million of the $200 million in contributions it gathered through the end of August. (Gates’ donation, which was reportedly more recent, isn’t yet reflected in public filings.)
Several of the billionaire donors to Future Forward PAC have been vocal in their support for Harris. “Congrats to Kamala Harris — now it is time to win,” Hastings wrote on X in July. He donated $1 million to Future Forward in late August. Moskovitz created and shared several memes supporting Harris’ candidacy, including one captioned “For your consideration: the Kamacolyte,” and donated $3 million to the super PAC in late August as well. Larsen announced a $10 million donation to Harris via XRP crypto tokens earlier this week, on Monday, October 21, and had so far given $1.75 million to Future Forward. Hoffman, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in August urging Silicon Valley to get behind Harris, donated $10 million to the super PAC in the first half of this year.
Future Forward is a somewhat nontraditional super PAC in that it spends most of its funding surveying Americans and using the results to test, create and air political ads via an unusually heavy focus on data analysis. The PAC has conducted more than four million voter surveys since Harris entered the race, but party strategists have raised criticism that there’s too much money behind one group with a singular belief in late-campaign ads, and not enough funding for on-the-ground efforts to get people to vote, the New York Times reported.
Future Forward’s analytical approach seems to resonate with some billionaires’ philosophies on giving, though there’s ample overlap with billionaires who give to other pro-Harris committees. For example, Hastings, Schmidt and Hoffman also donated both to Harris for President and the Harris Victory Fund.
“People who are interested in philanthropy should also be doing political donations because … depending on who is governing, we’ll have either a squashing or an amplifying effect on our philanthropic dollars,” Hoffman told in May 2023. “For example, if you care about economic justice and inclusion, some people will have a much better implication than others. If you care about maternal health and child mortality, some political leaders will do a much better job. I think political giving should be oriented around that, and that’s what I do myself personally.”
Here’s the list of billionaires other than Gates who have donated to Future Forward this election cycle, per FEC data from January 1, 2023 through August 31, 2024.
(The full list of billionaires who have donated to Harris’ campaign is here, and includes other pro-Harris committees; several billionaires mentioned have made additional donations since then.)