Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg biggest US 2013 giver
SEATTLE—Facebook president and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and hiswife, Priscilla Chan, were the most generous American philanthropists in 2013, with a donation of 18million shares of Facebook stock, valued at more than $970 million, to a Silicon Valley nonprofit in December.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on Monday that Zuckerberg’s donation was the largest charitable gift on public record in 2013 and put the young couple at the top of the magazine’s annual list of 50most generous Americans in 2013.
The top 50 contributors made donations last year totaling $7.7 billion, plus pledges of $2.9 billion.
The Chronicle’s editor says the most significant fact from the list was the amount of money coming from living donors, which totaled about the same amount as the two previous years combined.
“It’s a sure sign that the economy is getting better and people are getting a lot less cautious,” said Stacy Palmer, Chronicle editor.
Some of the nation’s biggest givers do not appear on the 2013 list, not because they stopped being generous but because their donations in 2013 were counted as pledges in previous years.
For example, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, gave their foundation slightly more than $181.3 million last year, but they were paying off a pledge of about $3.3 billion they made in 2004. CNN founder Ted Turner and Berkshire Hathaway chair Warren Buffett also made large gifts toward previous pledges.
It took gifts totaling at least $37.5 million to make the list this year. Forty-two of the top 50 made gifts of $50 million or more.
Thirty made big gifts to colleges and universities, but Palmer noted most college gifts went to science and research this year, not to buildings, as in previous years.
Ten of the 50 made the list because of bequests after their deaths, including the second biggest giver in 2013, George Mitchell, a Galveston, Texas, man who made his fortune in energy and real estate.