Larry Page, at age 52, already has a grantmaking operation with more money than the nation’s second-oldest philanthropic institution, John D. Rockefeller’s eponymous New York foundation. But good luck finding out where its checks are going. To date, the Google cofounder’s Carl Victor Page Memorial Foundation has sent nearly all its grants into the “black box” of a donor-advised fund and does not even have a website.
Laurene Powell Jobs can be found on stages at graduations and conferences talking about philanthropy. Her grantmaking operation, Emerson Collective, has a vibrant digital presence rich with lush photos and inventive graphic design. Yet such touches belie the fact that Emerson almost never shares how much money it is moving, whether in the form of individual grants or annual tallies of its grantmaking.
MacKenzie Scott has been on a nearly unprecedented philanthropic sprint, sending out around $26 billion since 2020, with more likely to come. You can find the names of recipients and most grant totals on the website of her operation, Yield Giving. But you will not come across a single photo, staff name or other detail about what’s going on behind the scenes, aside from her inimitable essays.
Page, Powell Jobs and Scott demonstrate the idiosyncratic varieties of philanthropic transparency — and opacity — practiced by billionaire donors in this New Gilded Age. And they are just three players in a vast cast of characters, operating everywhere from the sunshine to the shadows.
Last year, building on a longtime fascination with the varying levels of philanthropic disclosure practiced by such ultra-rich and exceedingly powerful donors, I proposed a tongue-in-cheek (if true-to-reality) taxonomy of this elite world’s strange gradients of shadow and light. Page tops the list of what I called the Black Box Billionaires, those who channel most of their foundation spending into donor-advised funds, which have no disclosure requirements. Scott headlines what I dubbed the Asterisk Club, a group that publicly shares their grants yet uses a type of charitable vehicle, an LLC, whose lack of required disclosures means we have to take such lists on faith. And there are whole other categories, like Publicists — the home of Powell Jobs — and Basics Only.
There are, of course, further grades of transparency even within each of these clubs. There are Black Box Billionaires whose operations have websites (e.g., hedge funder Steve Mandel Jr.) or issue press releases (Google cofounder Sergey Brin), and those with no digital presence at all (mobile phone pioneer Duan Yongping). There are members of the Asterisk Club who have foundations nested within their LLCs (Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan) or who once had grants databases but have taken them offline (retired hedge funder John Arnold and his wife, Laura, a former lawyer). In fact, I’ve written a whole separate guide to the weird world of philanthropic LLCs.
Across all these schools of practice, one thing is consistent: We never know if we have the full picture, and sometimes we know we do not.
But what we do know for certain is that in this new Gilded Age, billionaire donors are employing tax-deductible philanthropy to exercise ever-growing sway over the public square and the direction of government. But the lack of consistent disclosure — or sometimes any disclosure at all — makes it hard to conclusively link money spent to any particular outcome or influence. We cannot even track all the dollars. So how can we really understand the full scope of the influence that our nation’s wealthiest are wielding? In that way, this increasingly opaque world feels incompatible with healthy democracy — and all the more so at a time of increasing inequality.
According to Federal Reserve data, America’s 1% today control nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90% of the country, up from just over half as much in the late 1980s. It’s only reasonable to assume that many of the private jet class are — intentionally or subconsciously — using those winnings to support the systems that elevated them to that lofty position in the first place.
The evidence is that money is accumulating at the top. The 0.1% have nearly doubled their share of the nation’s riches over those decades, while the bottom 50% have seen their share fall by nearly a third. U.S. philanthropy, too, has seen the balance of giving shift toward the wealthiest. And cuts to nonprofit funding at home and abroad over the past year have further tipped that balance. Megadonors are becoming ever more critical, not just for fundraisers hustling for today’s campaign, but for the long-term funding of civil society. Yet we often do not know where their money is landing.
Of course, from the perspective of the new Gilded Age moguls themselves, deploying philanthropic dollars out in the open might invite risk, especially when it’s to achieve aims considered controversial. A skeptic of sunlight might mention a single name: George Soros.
His Open Society Foundations, at least, has been a model of transparency, detailing its funding in a public grants database. Despite the open books, Soros and OSF have been the target of all manner of slurs, innuendos, antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Soros’ status as the right’s top bogeyman has now put OSF, more than any other left-leaning philanthropy, in the Trump administration’s sights.
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Some of the ire against Soros has been stoked by right-wing rage machines that traffic in disinformation and half-truths. Yet it also reflects a widespread public discomfort with billionaire influence — and to me, that is one more argument for policy that would throw the curtains wide and shine the light on where the money is flowing.
The problem is that philanthropic transparency has become, functionally, optional. By choosing a donor-advised fund, donors have the option to conceal every gift they make within the sponsoring organization’s larger list of disclosures, making it all but impossible to know from whom it came. An LLC does not even have that requirement. Yet both structures still provide donors certain tax benefits — in some cases, even exceeding those of a foundation — while requiring less disclosure. Meanwhile, foundation megadonors like Larry Page can, if they choose, shunt most or all of their annual payout into a DAF, satisfying the law’s requirements and concealing where the money ended up — assuming it went anywhere at all.
Today’s reality is that no one knows for sure how much billionaires are giving, nor to whom, except for those awards they choose to reveal. If that continues unchecked, billionaires’ uncontested philanthropic sway in a new Gilded Age will become so entrenched and so hard to gauge that one day, we’ll stop calling it a new era and simply refer to it as the way things are.
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes feedback, disagreements, tips and requests.
This piece is part of our special series on billionaire giving in a new Gilded Age. Check out all the articles here.
