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First, for amassing the second-b iggest fortune in the US as one of the most talented investors the wor ld has ever known. Second, for an aversion to spending a dime of that $4 1 billion on anything but the strictly necessary. That includes declinin g to provide his kids with fortunes of their own, collecting yachts or r acehorses, or giving large chunks of his wealth to worthy causes. Thus i t may strike some as the supreme paradox that the man who is one of Amer ica's greatest misers in life will probably become one of its greatest p hilanthropists in death.
That reality came into focus in July, when Susie, Buffett's wife and phil anthropic muse, died of a stroke at 72. Now, the bulk of Susie's Berkshi re Hathaway stake -- $25 billion -- is pouring into the foundation that she and Warren shared, a tiny Omaha operation that supports reproductiv e choice and nuclear weapons reduction but that has mostly operated unde r layers of secrecy. The slew of record-shattering gifts suggests that a t least a sliver of the voluminous gains of the late-'90s stock boom is being funneled back into society -- and that today's Carnegie libraries and Rockefeller yellow-fever vaccines can't be far behind. The year's other billion-dollar-club members include No. It's one of the largest donations in history by a living donor. To put it into perspective, that one gift is three time s bigger than the amount that America's richest family, the descendants of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, has given during their entir e lifetimes, according to our ranking. Others on our list contributed mega-gifts in the hundred-million range. List newcomer and me dical-device mogul Alfred Mann gave $200 million for medical research in stitutes in Israel and at Johns Hopkins. "Money is only worth what you c an do with it," says Mann, the 78-year-old son of an immigrant grocer, w ho still works full time and intends to leave his entire $14 billion es tate to charity. School days The year of the mega-gift also saw a string of donations to universities that were unprecedented in their size. Liquor import king and Top 50 new comer Sidney E Frank, the son of a Connecticut orchard man, slept on sh eets sewn from sacks until he got to Brown University. In September, he gave the school $100 million to fund scholarships for up to 130 kids a y ear whose families can't afford the $31,000 annual tuition and the $8,50 0 room and board. The gift was inspired by Frank's own need to drop out after his freshman year because he couldn't afford tuition. This was the largest gift in Brown's history and one of the single biggest donations ever toward undergraduate scholarships. Though he didn't qualify for the Top 50, he pledged $100 million to the now-named University of Michigan Ross School of Business . Never has the 187-year-old university received a gift so huge -- nor h as any other US business school. Rather than hoard their GDP-sized fortunes, many in the Top 50 became mor e extravagant in their charity this year, urged on by a growing belief t hat the value of solving problems today is greater than bequeathing the money when they die. And by accelerating their giving and doling out lar ge sums, they have a better chance of effecting change. As this belief spreads, experts say the ranks of the mega-givers are sure to grow, especially as the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history looms on the horizon, with at least $41 trillion estimated to c hange hands by 2052 -- $6 trillion of which is projected to go to charit y, according to Boston College's John J Havens and Paul. Even the most youthful on the Top 50 are participating in the accelerati on and mega-gift trends. Michael and Susan Dell, 39 and 40 respectively, followed pledges of nearly $300 million in 1999 and 2001 for children's causes with one that was more than twice that size last year. Says Cher yl Saban, 53, who with husband Haim Saban is ranked No. Already, the Top 50 donors, over the course of their lifetimes, have thro wn a dizzying $65 billion at charitable causes, many of them addressing the gaping inequalities that increasingly threaten domestic society, glo bal stability, and world peace. The spread of globalization and the post -September 11 political climate have spurred some to direct their giving overseas, a trend mirrored in the corporate sector. Disturbed by the fac t that 30,000 nuclear warheads are on hair-trigger alert, Turner has foc used his recent philanthropy on reducing the number of nuclear weapons i n existence and preventing the spread of new ones. "The problems need to be solved now, not in 20 years," says Turner. "If we do everything righ t in the next 50 years, we'll be living in a paradise. But if we don't w e could be gone, or living in a hot, burning hell." Mega-giving is also helping to take up some of the burden of foundations and other nonprofits that saw their endowments crushed during the recess ion. Those problems were compounded by deep social spending cuts on the part of the Bush Administration. Given the gargantuan federal deficit, t here's not likely to be any increase from Washington anytime soon. That means there will continue to be great pressure on individual givers, and especially on the super-philanthropists, to dig deep. "Philanthropy and the entire nonprofit sector face more challenges than at any other time in recent memory," says Jeff Krehely, deputy director of the National C ommittee for Responsive Philanthropy. To suss out the new entrants on this year's list, and to create our overa ll ranking, we analyzed public records and conducted scores of interview s with community foundations, nonprofit experts, billionaires, fund-rais ers, and wealth watchers. To qualify for the Top 50, philanthropists had to have given or pledged $116 million in the past five years -- $21 mil lion more than the minimum last year. That knocked off givers such as Ne tscape Communications Corp. co-founder James Clark and CyBerCorp founder Philip Berber and his wife, Donna. Maurice "Chico" Sabbah fell off our list after he and his business partner agreed to pay $400 million in Jul y to settle fraud charges, putting an end to further philanthropy. Now t heir creditors are trying to grab Sabbah's $100 million pledge to the cu shy American Hebrew Academy, the nation's first non-Orthodox Jewish boar ding school, located in Greensboro, NC Newcomers this year include Veronica Atkins, the widow of Dr. Robert C A tkins, who pledged her entire $500 million fortune to end the "di-obesit y" -- diabetes and obesity -- epidemic, and Oprah Winfrey, the first Afr ican American and second self-made woman to make the Top 50. When she was 12, her mother told the f amily there was no money for even a single Christmas present. Just when Winfrey started to accept a gift-less Christmas, three nuns showed up at the door with a turkey and toys. "I remember feeling that I mattered en ough to these nuns -- who I had never met and to this day still do not k now their names -- and what it meant that they had remembered me. Our research this year also turned up a new force in giving that may well disrupt philanthropy in the same way eBay Inc. Not surprisingly, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar epitomizes the trend. Rat her than picking one cause and creating a strategy for attacking it, his philanthropy takes a bottom-up approach, allowing individuals to determ ine the vision and direction in the same way the community of users do a t eBay. No delay in giving By throwing big bets at targeted causes, the mega-givers are a foil to U S foundations, which have been lambasted by critics and legislators for dispensing just 5% of their assets each year, including administrative costs. This enables them to maintain their "corpus," so they can operate in perpetuity, but critics say they could afford to give much more. Poi nting to the delay in social benefit, a recent McKinsey study by Jansen and David Katz found that keeping all this cash on the sidelines rather than giving it out now diminishes its power to address problems by as mu ch as 50%. By donating virtually all of their assets to charity, and doing it during their...
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