Michael Bloomberg tops one list of 2025’s biggest givers and MacKenzie Scott tops the other, and the difference comes down to a donor-advised fund she declined to discuss.
The fifty most generous Americans gave $22.4bn in 2025, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and the median gift on its list was $105m. The Conversation calculated that the total was 35% above an inflation-adjusted $16.6bn the year before, and that the top ten donors accounted for nearly three-quarters of it. Roughly two-thirds of the fifty work in finance or technology. On the Chronicle’s list their ages ran from 36, for Jeff Sobrato, who appears at No. 18 with his real-estate developer family, to 95, for Warren Buffett.
Who came first depends on which list you read. The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 ranks a single calendar year and counts the gifts and pledges that donors disclose, including money moved into their own foundations and donor-advised funds. Forbes counts cash given to charities, keeps a running lifetime total and, in February 2026, crowned a different winner. Neither is wrong. A transfer into a family foundation counts as giving on the Chronicle’s list, yet a foundation is required by law to give or spend only 5% of its assets each year, as The Conversation pointed out. A gift to your own foundation is generosity with a forwarding address.
MacKenzie Scott gave more than $7.1bn in 2025, the most of anyone on Forbes’s count
Forbes says MacKenzie Scott gave away more than anyone else on Earth in 2025, and the most in a single year since Forbes began tracking top givers in 2012. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s own analysis puts her year at more than $7.1bn, the most she has ever given in one. Inside Philanthropy reported that the end-of-year essay on her Yield Giving site, posted on 9 December 2025, gave the total as $7,166,000,000 across 186 recipients. The money is Amazon stock. Forbes reckons she has disposed of more than 75% of the shares she received from Jeff Bezos and, in under seven years, has given $26.4bn to more than 2,500 groups, which still left her with a net worth Forbes estimated at $30.9bn in February 2026. Fortune observed that her 2025 donations alone eclipsed her former husband’s lifetime giving. She is nowhere on the Philanthropy 50, though. The Chronicle listed her among its notable absences after she and her representatives declined to provide information on gifts to her donor-advised funds, and Panorama Global counted about 45% of the December grants with no reported amount. The biggest giver of 2025, on Forbes’s arithmetic, is the one the Chronicle could not count.
Michael Bloomberg gave $4.3bn and topped the Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 for a third year
On the Chronicle’s ranking, the winner is the man who founded the Bloomberg financial-news empire and then ran New York. Michael Bloomberg gave $4.3bn in 2025, up from $3.7bn in 2024, and took the No. 1 spot for the third consecutive year. The money went through Bloomberg Philanthropies to the arts, education, the environment, public health and programmes to improve city governments, the last a cause few donors on the list have studied from the mayor’s chair. The Conversation worked out that he alone accounts for 19% of the list’s $22.4bn. Nearly one dollar in five given by America’s fifty biggest donors in 2025 came from a single former mayor.
Bill Gates gave $3.7bn to the Gates Foundation, second on the Chronicle’s list
The Chronicle puts Bill Gates second, with $3.7bn given in 2025, all of it to the Gates Foundation, and by coincidence exactly the sum that won Bloomberg the title a year earlier. Forbes, which ranks lifetime giving, pairs the Microsoft co-founder with Melinda French Gates, his former wife, and in February 2026 put their combined total at $52.6bn, up $4.9bn on its previous edition. The two of them founded the Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett in 2010. In February 2026, The Conversation reported, Gates apologised to Foundation staff for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. His 2025 money went to one address, the foundation that carries his name.
Paul Allen’s estate gave $3.1bn, seven years after his death
The third-largest donor of 2025 on the Chronicle’s list died in 2018. Paul Allen, Microsoft’s other co-founder, left an estate that is still being settled, according to The Conversation, and in 2025 it produced a $3.1bn bequest to start a foundation focused on science and technology. That means two of the top three places on the Philanthropy 50 went to the men who started Microsoft. A bequest to a foundation that has yet to exist is the purest form of the delayed gift: the transfer is complete and the spending has barely begun. Allen is the only donor in the top three who could not have read his own ranking.
Warren Buffett gave $1.3bn to four family foundations in the year he retired from Berkshire
At 95 the oldest donor on the Chronicle’s list, Warren Buffett gave $1.3bn to four family foundations in 2025 and retired as chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of it. Among the year’s biggest single gifts was his November transfer of 1.5 million Berkshire shares, valued at $746.7m, to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife, who died in 2004. Two of his three children sit on its board and his former son-in-law leads it, which gives the arrangement the look of a family seat with a charitable purpose. Forbes’s 2025 edition had put his lifetime giving at $62bn, or 30% of his fortune. In February 2026 Forbes found that seventeen of its top 25 givers had given away at least 10% of their net worth, and that among the twelve richest Americans only Buffett had cleared the same bar.
Michael and Susan Dell gave $975m in 2025, with a $6.25bn pledge left off the count
Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, and his wife Susan gave $975m in 2025 to their foundation and donor-advised fund, enough for fifth place on the Philanthropy 50. The larger number sits outside the ranking. The couple pledged $6.25bn to put $250 into investment accounts for 25 million children, and eJewishPhilanthropy reported that the Chronicle itself noted the Dells would have taken first place had the pledge been counted. Per child, the sum is modest; multiplied out, it is half as much again as anything Bloomberg gave in 2025. Counted, it would have put them above Bloomberg. Uncounted, they finished fifth.
Phil and Penny Knight gave $866.2m, and made the single biggest gift of 2025
The Nike co-founder and his wife sit sixth on the Philanthropy 50 with $866.2m, made up of $500m to the Oregon Health & Science University cancer institute and $366.2m to their own giving vehicles. They also sit first on a different Chronicle list. Its December round-up of 2025’s largest single gifts, which totalled $5bn, was headed by $2bn from Phil and Penny Knight, followed by Buffett’s $746.7m and a $500m pledge from Jeff Bezos’s mother and stepfather. One list measures a year’s giving and the other the size of a single gift, which is how the same couple can finish sixth and first in the same twelve months. The same December coverage put two donations totalling $600m into university athletics and a $300m gift behind a new hospital and workforce expansion in South Dakota. Over the years, the Knights have given Oregon Health & Science University at least $2.7bn.
Sergey Brin gave $477m to Parkinson’s research in 2025, by Forbes’s count
The Google co-founder has given $2.2bn to Parkinson’s research, the disease his late mother had, including $477m in 2025, according to Forbes. Against a fortune Forbes estimated at $249bn in February 2026, that lifetime total comes to a little under 1%.
Whether 2025’s billionaires gave faster than they got richer
On the figures available, not quite. Forbes’s 2025 edition found that the lifetime giving of its top 25 had risen 14% while their fortunes rose 18.5%. The Institute for Policy Studies, an advocacy think tank with a critical stance, found that 32 of the original American Giving Pledge signatories are still billionaires and have become 283% wealthier since signing, with a combined $908bn. By IPS’s count, Laura and John Arnold are the only couple among those 32 to have fulfilled the commitment, and 79% of the tracked gifts from original Pledgers went into private foundations. IPS’s own verdict on the Pledge is “unfulfilled, unfulfillable”, and it is a verdict from a think tank with a position. The Associated Press reported that only 19 of the Forbes 400 gave enough in 2025 to appear on the Chronicle’s list. The other 381 did not make the cut.
Cover photograph via Influencewatch; via The New York Times.
