The wealthiest Americans have gotten nearly $1 trillion richer this year. Are they getting more generous?
By Phoebe Liu, Staff
The 400 richest people in America have doled out some $287 billion in charitable giving over their lifetimes, to causes including climate change, education and space-based solar power. Yet, overall, the members of The 400 aren’t all that generous, relatively speaking. Their aggregate charitable giving equals just 5% of their combined $5.4 trillion in wealth—and only a third of their increase in wealth over the past year alone.
Some are, of course, much more generous than others, so dug into each list member’s known charitable giving to assign a philanthropy score, ranging from 1 to 5. If we couldn’t find any information about a person’s giving and they did not provide details, we gave them a score of N/A, meaning not available. In all, we found lifetime out-the-door giving totals ranging from less than $100,000 (at least 10 400 members gave this lowly sum) to $60 billion (Warren Buffett, the biggest giver on the list).
To calculate the scores, we added our estimate of each billionaire’s lifetime giving to their 2024 400 list net worth, then divided the lifetime giving estimate by that sum. Each 1-5 score corresponds to a range of giving as a percentage of net worth (see below for details). We only counted out-the-door giving, by which we mean funds given directly to charitable causes or given away by an individual’s foundation, as opposed to cash sitting in billionaires’ private foundations or in tax-advantaged donor-advised funds; the latter have few public reporting requirements, making it impossible to know how much has made it to those in need. We also only count paid-out portions of multi-year pledges. We reached out to every list member for feedback. Many have foundations with publicly available tax filings that provide details on yearly grants, although those details often have a one- or two-year lag. Some provided specific details about additional donations and recipients. Others declined to comment or did not respond.
More than 70% of the billionaires on The 400 scored a 1 or 2, meaning they have donated less than 5% of their fortune to charitable causes. Despite scores of new billionaire donations, from Jeff Bezos’ hundreds of millions in new grants to combat climate change to the billions flowing from the Gates Foundation and others toward vaccine research, that percentage is actually the highest it has been since began scoring out-the-door giving in 2020. Much of that, no doubt, is because more than three-quarters of The 400 got richer over the past year amid the red hot stock market, some by billions or even tens of billions of dollars. For many billionaires, their giving simply has not kept pace. Also, some 400 members have not yet released nonprofit filings showing their 2023 and 2024 giving, which may have increased as their wealth has spiked. Michael Dell, for example, exchanged his stake in cloud computing firm VMware for $33 billion in cash and stock when Broadcom bought it in November. Around that time, he put $3.6 billion into his family foundation and another half billion into a donor-advised fund—but we don’t yet know from tax filings how much has been paid out to operating nonprofits.
The overwhelming majority of 400 members got the same score this year as they had last year, though several made big jumps. That includes former Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder, largely because he donated his mansion to charity, as well as hedge fund billionaires Ken Griffin and Stanley Druckenmiller, who have ramped up giving, mainly to hospitals and educational organizations in Florida and New York, respectively.
Only ten of America’s 400 richest people have given away more than 20% of their stash, per ’ estimates, earning a rare 5: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, Edythe Broad, Lynn Schusterman, Reed Hastings and Amos Hostetter Jr. They’re largely the same group as in years past, minus hedge fund tycoon John Arnold, who dropped off this year’s 400, and eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, who got sufficiently richer this year to push his score to a 4. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings, meanwhile, joined the 5 club, after gifting half his Netflix shares earlier this year and confirming to that his donor-advised fund has disbursed $1.8 billion to undisclosed charitable groups.
The 400 2024 Philanthropy Breakdown
For the fifth year in a row, the most philanthropic member of The 400 by percentage of net worth donated is hedge fund founder George Soros, who has given away 74% of his fortune. The 94-year-old has doled out $21 billion of the $32 billion he has put into his Open Society Foundations, which funds groups that promote democracy, transparency and freedom of speech globally. Soros passed the foundation’s operating reins to his son Alex just over a year ago.
Notably, Soros—the only 400 member to donate more than 50% of their wealth so far, per ’ methodology—has not signed the Giving Pledge, which asks billionaires to give away at least half of their fortune in life or at death. (Buffett’s $60 billion, while the most in dollar terms, equals just 29% of his fortune.) MacKenzie Scott, meanwhile, has given away more than half of her Amazon shares, as of a regulatory filing in February, but her giving has not yet passed half her net worth because her remaining Amazon stock keeps skyrocketing in value. In March, Scott announced $640 million in unrestricted cash grants to 361 winners of her “Open Call” challenge—part of her goal to increase billionaire giving to global grassroots nonprofits.
Others might be scored too low on our ranking simply because they prefer to give quietly, either writing checks or giving cash directly to those in need, or because they run their giving through donor-advised funds or other opaque entities. Take Alphabet cofounder Larry Page, the sixth-richest person in the world. Unlike many other billionaires who primarily give through DAFs, we have some visibility into Page’s giving through his Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation. The private foundation typically reports tens of millions of dollars in yearly grants in its tax filings; however, more than 99% percent of those grants—some $1.3 billion in total—actually have gone to his donor-advised funds. Subtracting his black-box DAF funds leaves us with only approximately $7 million in trackable grants, which is why Page has a giving score of 1. However if his DAFs are themselves making grants, his giving (and thus his score) could be much higher. Page did not respond to a request for comment on his giving to .
Grading The Giving
More members of The 400 received a score of 2 than any other score, meaning most of America’s richest people have given away between 1% and 5% of their net worth.
Here’s a guide to each score. Data are as of September 1, 2024.
1: Has given away less than 1% of wealth
Who got this score: Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, Nvidia cofounder Jensen Huang and 131 others.
2: Has given away 1% to 4.99% of wealth
Who got this score: Meta cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, and 148 others.
3: Has given away 5% to 9.99% of wealth
Who got this score: Hedge fund titan Ken Griffin, music and film mogul David Geffen, Nike cofounder Phil Knight, and 40 others.
4: Has given away 10% to 19.99% of wealth
Who got this score: Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, filmmaker George Lucas, Meta cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, and 20 others.
5: Has given away 20% or more of wealth
Who got this score: Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Melinda French Gates, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, Edythe Broad & family, Lynn Schusterman & family, Reed Hastings and Amos Hostetter Jr.
