Some of the richest people in the world have made philanthropy a top priority. The amount of philanthropic donations coming out of Silicon Valley has increased recently. According to the sources, it claims that millionaires have donated the highest portion of their wealth in different charities.
Here is list of top 5 charities done by tech people:
Bill Gates And Melinda French Gates
In 2000, Bill Gates and his then-wife Melinda French Gates established the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The co-founder of Microsoft and his wife promised to give away 95% of their income, and by 2010, they had donated $17 billion to their foundation to fund health initiatives and fight global poverty. According to the foundation’s website, this amount increased to over $36 billion in 2018.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has accomplished a remarkable number of things in its 22 years of existence. It was a founding member of Gavi, a vaccination alliance founded in 2000 to increase access to immunisation in underdeveloped countries. The foundation has given Gavi more than $4 billion, and Gavi is currently serving as a key player in the delivery of Covid-19 vaccinations in developing nations.
Furthermore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has supported 20,000 low-income students of colour in the US with university scholarships and has worked to improve sanitation in developing countries.
Warren Buffett
Based on market prices at the time of each donation, Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, contributed a further $4.1 billion to charity in June 2021, increasing his lifetime donations to roughly $41 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock.
Together with Bill and Melinda Gates, Buffett launched The Giving Pledge in 2010 with the goal of inspiring the world’s wealthiest individuals to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable organisations. The Giving Pledge has 231 signatories from 28 different nations as of January 2021. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Charles Francis Feeney, Bill Ackman, and Larry Ellison are among those who have signed it.
George Soros
The Open Society Foundations, an organization that primarily provides to international causes, community development, social services, health, and education, with initiatives in more than 120 different countries, was created by George Soros of Soros Fund Management in 1993.
In the early years of his significant philanthropy, Soros supported the open exchange of ideas in Communist Hungary by funding academic visits to the West, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he founded the European University as a place to foster critical thinking. He also gave scholarships to Black South Africans living under apartheid.
The Open Society Foundations said in 2017 that Soros has given $18 billion of his wealth to support the Foundations’ ongoing activities. His overall gift to the Foundations now stands at $32 billion.
Azim Premji
Azim Premji is the founder and chairman of the Azim Premji Foundation, the chairman of Indian consulting and IT firm Wipro, and the first person of Indian descent to join The Giving Pledge. His charity was founded in 2001 and focuses on education in India, where only 69 percent of people in rural areas are literate. With a $2 billion donation to the Azim Premji Trust in 2018, Azim made a significant contribution to the nation’s education system.
Premji has previously said that he is not exhilarated by wealth. The billionaire had already given away 25% of his personal riches to charity as of 2013. Premji became the leading philanthropist in India in 2019 after donating Wipro shares valued at $7.6 billion. By 2015, he had donated an additional 18% of his Wipro shareholding.
Charles Francis Feeney
Charles Francis Fenney, known as the “James Bond of Philanthropy,” made his money in 1960 when he and Robert Warren Miller co-founded the DFS Group in Hong Kong. Feeney established The Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982, one of the biggest private philanthropic organizations in the world, and gave anonymously for a number of years before his identity was made public in a business dispute in 1997.
Throughout the course of four decades, Feeney gave more than $8 billion to foundations, schools, and charities all over the world. After completing its goal of distributing all of Feeney’s fortune that year, the non-profit organization The Atlantic Philanthropies was shut down in September 2020 by the former millionaire.
