Visit the website of a major legacy foundation and almost without exception you will find one of the hallmarks of philanthropic transparency: a grants database. But if you’re hoping for the same from America’s biggest individual donors, you’re often out of luck.
The operations of some of the nation’s most well-known billionaire donors — like George Soros, Bill Gates and MacKenzie Scott — do share detailed lists of their grants. But many more do not.
For some, this is no surprise. After all, certain funders, like Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, do not even have websites for their philanthropies.
Yet grants databases are often lacking even for operations that have extensive websites, and philanthropies that clearly spend a lot of money on press releases, articles and even videos about their grantmaking, such as the funding vehicles of Mike Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs.
Over more than four years of reporting for Inside Philanthropy, I’ve become fascinated with the levels of transparency — from open book to black box — among today’s billionaire donors. I thought that was a niche and wonky preoccupation, but an unexpectedly popular LinkedIn post last month showed me I’m not the only one with a fixation on grants databases.
For my fellow grants nerds, and as gentle encouragement for mega-givers of all kinds to share more details about who they are funding, I present the following taxonomy of billionaire funding transparency. A shorthand, if you will, for how much sunshine the super rich allow into their operations. I’ve focused on climate funders, since that’s the area I know best, but these categories are by no means exclusive to that corner of the sector.
Broad classifications are tricky, particularly given the complex, multi-entity structures used by modern philanthropists. But after years of trying to track down the grantmaking of some of the richest people on the planet, I believe these six labels aptly (if roughly) sum up the odd mixture of approaches that billionaire philanthropists take to sharing — or not sharing — where their money is going.
The Sunshine Funders
Visit the website of one of these billionaire operations and you will find grants databases that are as robust and detailed as the average legacy foundation’s.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Walton Family Foundation all fall in this category. Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna’s Good Ventures, like many effective-altruism-inspired funders, is another that takes this approach, as is the Heising-Simons Foundation.
It’s worth noting this level of disclosure does not require some fancy tech solution or big-dollar investment. The Wyss Foundation simply posts a text list of its grants. Jack Dorsey, the Twitter and Square cofounder, uses a Google Sheet. That seems pretty affordable.
The Asterisk Club
On the surface, these billionaires are Sunshine Funders — and to some extent, the image is accurate.
Visit the website of, say, Steve and Connie Ballmer’s grantmaking operation, the Ballmer Group, and you’ll find a robust grants database with filters and sorting functions. Another in this club, MacKenzie Scott’s Yield Giving, has what I consider to be one of the best grants databases in philanthropy — it even lets you download your searches.
Yet the transparency here deserves an asterisk. Since such donors give via LLCs and donor-advised funds, not foundations, it’s impossible to know whether we’re getting a complete picture of their grantmaking — and we’re not getting any insight into their operations’ budgets.
Time for an important caveat: All the billionaires in this article may be making additional commitments through DAFs or individual gifts. What makes the philanthropies in this category unusual is that they are ostensibly transparent, to the extent that they have detailed grants databases anyone can easily reference. But unlike a foundation, whose grants database can be cross-referenced with data from its 990 forms, they are free to disclose only what they want. It’s a narrow but important distinction, hence the asterisk.
This club includes multi-faceted operations, like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, that give and invest via a mix of structures that can include a foundation, a donor-advised fund, an advocacy or action fund, an LLC and more. To their credit, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan list the funding they issue from such sources. But other than their foundation, we have to take their word for it.
Perhaps the best illustration of how fragile such transparency can be among this group is Arnold Ventures. Until recently, Laura and John Arnold’s operation had an online grants database that detailed not only their foundation’s grants, but awards from other branches of their operation. But when I looked for it while compiling this story, I saw it had been taken offline. (A spokesperson said it was removed due to infrequent use; the foundation now posts the 990 forms for its foundation and advocacy arm.)
The Basics Only
A website and a little bit of verbiage is typically all you get from this group — and sometimes not even that much. If you want to know where the money is actually flowing, you will need to dig into IRS filings.
Take Barbara Picower’s JPB Foundation. Visitors to its website can read a few sentences about its program areas and stated values, as well as who’s on staff. But there’s nary a mention of grantees, let alone a database listing them. Another in this camp is Nat Simons and Laura Baxter-Simons’ Sea Change Foundation, an operation whose one-time secrecy helped give it a starring role in a GOP conspiracy theory. The Sequoia Climate Foundation was also once in this group, before its new grants database vaulted it into the Sunshine Funders camp.
At the extreme end, there are operations like the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. The Google cofounder’s foundation granted more than $500 million in 2022, about as much as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. But it does not even have a website.
What makes this group generally more transparent than those further below is that, ultimately, these donors are still giving through private foundations, and each operation’s 990-PF forms will tell you where its money is going. Services like Candid will also pull that data into their databases. At the end of the day, their grantmaking is public, albeit available only a few years after the fact, and solely to those with the expertise or tools to track down the numbers.
The late Julian Robertson’s foundation offers an interesting case of what happens when the founder of a Basics Only operation dies. The Robertson Foundation for years shared only brief descriptions of its priorities, and now has promised to launch a new website. Perhaps it will take a step into the sunlight?
The Publicists
This group of billionaires love to talk about their grantmaking. They have sharp websites with gorgeous photos, professionally written grantee stories, even videos. But if you actually want to know how much money they’re spending and where it’s going — in short, if you want a grants database — you’ll largely be disappointed.
Members of this group are, to my mind, the most contradictory. They are eager to tell you what they want to show you, but only exactly how they want to share it.
They are also among the trickiest to classify, as they exist on a wide spectrum. Some are actually more transparent than their Basics Only peers listed above. For instance, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation and Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s Schmidt Family Foundation do not have grants databases. So you still have to turn to the IRS filings to see where the money is going. But what they do put on their websites offers some useful additional insight.
Others in this category are less transparent, largely due to the way they give. Bloomberg Philanthropies is perhaps the most curious example. I don’t know of any other funder that issues as many press releases, and few have such extensive websites. Yet you won’t find a list of its grants. Nor do the 990s for the Bloomberg Family Foundation account for all its grantmaking, since Bloomberg Philanthropies also includes Bloomberg’s corporate giving and Mike Bloomberg’s personal giving. In 2022, for instance, you could look up where the foundation sent $977 million in grants, but the operation as a whole distributed $1.7 billion.
The Bezos Earth Fund also shares a lot of details about grantees and funding amounts, including how much is spent by program area. But does it have a grants database with all that information in one place? No. Jeff Bezos’ climate fund also issues awards through an LLC, so you cannot check an IRS filing.
Similarly, Lukas Walton’s Builders Initiative provides a lot to read on its website, but neither it nor the foundation’s 990 filings offer a full account of the operation’s grantmaking, since roughly half of all awards flow through a donor-advised fund.
On the least transparent end of this category are operations like Jobs’ other philanthropy, the Emerson Collective. Its website has almost too much content to review; there are sections for videos, podcasts and newsletters. Yet there’s no way to tell where most of its money is going. Some grantees are mentioned, but there’s no grants database, and, since none of its grantmaking is done through a foundation, there are no IRS filings to consult.
The Black Box Billionaires
You might call this the Larry Page category. Technically, the Google cofounder’s Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation — named for his father — is as transparent as any other private foundation, all of which must file a list of their grantees with the IRS each year. But Page’s philanthropy and several other Black Box Billionaires’ operations avoid transparency by giving most of their funding to donor-advised funds.
Since those accounts have no disclosure requirements at the individual level, it’s impossible to know where that money went. In fact, as critics often point out, it’s impossible to tell whether those dollars have even reached working charities. In Page’s case, 99% of grants have gone to DAFs in recent years. Billionaire investors Steve Mandel Jr. and Paul Singer have also sent 90% or more of their payout to DAFs recently.
As long as they’re routing all that money into DAF accounts, we don’t know what they are funding, if anything. DAFs have many useful and legitimate purposes. But in these cases, they are basically black boxes.
Related: Meet the Black Box Billionaires: Are These America’s Most Secretive Megadonors?
The Invisibles
As I’ve written before, the most secretive billionaire donors are the ones whose names we don’t yet know. Such giving has a rich history in philanthropy, best typified by the initially anonymous approach of the late Chuck Feeney, whose high-profile giving through the spend-down of the Atlantic Philanthropies was preceded by a long period in which no one could figure out where all those gifts were coming from.
At the moment, tax law gives such donors as many tax benefits as those giving through a foundation, or more, despite the foundation’s dramatically greater disclosure requirements. Donor-advised funds, for instance, allow for generally more favorable tax treatment than foundations, according to experts. Will that last? We’ll see.
