The rich buy the future first.Then it gets cheap.

Brain-computer interfaces to restore, then augment, neural function.

Reusable heavy-lift rockets aimed at Mars colonization, not just satellite launch.

Google-backed anti-aging research spinout, co-founded with Brin in 2013.

Reusable orbital and lunar launch systems.

Investor in a $3B-funded cellular reprogramming startup (his personal share undisclosed).

Pledged 2020, $2.3B deployed by 2026 — climate and nature giving.

Pledged to "cure, prevent, or manage all disease" by 2100; funds the CZI Biohub across UCSF, Stanford, and UC Berkeley.

Google-backed anti-aging research spinout, co-founded with Page in 2013.

Personal donations toward Parkinson’s research, disclosed after Brin found he carries the LRRK2 risk mutation.

Cancer research institute combining biology and technology.

Funded aging and disease-prevention research before closing in 2013.

Framed explicitly around national "sovereignty" in mathematics and AI, not a specific problem.

Accelerating biomedical research with AI and advanced computing.

AI computing power donated to universities and nonprofits for scientific research.

Two decades of annual Berkshire stock gifts to the Gates Foundation’s global health and poverty work (ended 2026).

Redirecting his remaining stake to family-run foundations by 2034 — Howard G. Buffett’s work is food-security-focused, echoing the malnutrition gap flagged elsewhere on this index, though not yet a ranked problem here.

Buying more of what already works — proven cancer-detection and proton-therapy equipment deployed at national scale across Spain’s public health system, not funding unproven science.

Environmental conservation education and workforce development — institution-building, not unproven science.

Economic mobility for children and families in the US — $767M given in 2024 alone.

Founded and solely funded a nonpartisan project to make government data legible to citizens — measurement infrastructure, not a frontier science bet, but the closest thing on this list to this site’s own "measure so we can manage" thesis.

Funded 653M+ polio vaccines across 33 African countries and a COVID-19 vaccine supply deal for Latin America — proven vaccines deployed at scale, not new science.

A new "whole health" medical school with free tuition, plus a 30-year, $700M affiliation with Mercy to expand healthcare access in the Heartland — new delivery model, not unproven biology.

MPOWER tobacco-control policy and advocacy across 110+ countries — a proven public-health intervention scaled by funding and policy pressure, not new science.

Free on-chain education platform, reaching 70,000+ children — access, not frontier research.

Modest, real exception to the pattern above — funded an open-source biotech research project.

Next-generation Natrium nuclear reactors — over $1.4B in private financing.

Climate-tech venture fund co-founded with Bezos and others, 110+ companies backed.

Personal (non-foundation) venture bets on Alzheimer’s treatments — the same disease-category gap Sergey Brin’s Parkinson’s giving surfaces, independently confirmed by a second billionaire.

Climate policy, Indigenous land-back causes, and finance/engineering education — modest relative to net worth ($172M in foundation assets).

Personal $100M gift (2018) to found a foundation for the study of the human brain — the third billionaire on this page whose giving lands on neurodegenerative disease, after Brin and Gates.

Cumulative funding for biomedical research since 1990, plus science prizes.

Pledged $70B by 2030 across the green-energy value chain, including a 1M-ton/year green hydrogen production target — one of the largest single corporate energy-transition commitments anywhere.

Five giga-factories (solar, batteries, electrolysers, fuel cells, power electronics) on 5,000 acres in Jamnagar. $10B from Reliance’s own resources committed first; a further $75-81B multi-year target has been announced but is less certain.

A $100M gift made by her late husband David H. Koch in 2007, funding the family wealth she now holds — the second billionaire on this page whose giving lands on cancer, after Ellison.

Chairman of the Stargate AI-infrastructure project (up to $500B in total scope across partners) and led a $41B SoftBank investment into OpenAI. This is compute/energy infrastructure for AI, a distinct thing from the "AI safety" welfare-problem this index deliberately excluded — flagged here as revealed capital, not a recommendation to rank AI as a problem.

Hometown education fund in Fujian province — teacher training, edtech, vocational education infrastructure. A $28.9M follow-on gift came in 2023.

Personal and Fast Retailing giving to UNHCR since 2006 — clothing, funds, and emergency response (Bangladesh, Ukraine). Humanitarian relief, not frontier research.

$100M tuition-free gift to a free-speech-focused university, alongside $209M+ over a decade on school-choice political advocacy (PACs, candidates) — ideologically framed spending, not neutral established-cause giving or frontier research.

A €3B AI research and startup campus explicitly aimed at giving Europe an OpenAI-class competitor — his foundation’s direct contribution is smaller, the total scope is state- and Schwarz-Group-backed. Same gap as Masayoshi Son’s Stargate bet, independently, from a different continent.

His alma mater — $291M in CATL shares (2026), on top of a prior $166M gift in 2021. University giving, not a frontier-science bet distinct from his own company’s core battery business.

RMB100M personal gift to an education fund in his hometown — modest relative to net worth, conventional local giving.

Over $500M cumulative to his alma mater, including the $300M naming gift for the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — elite-university giving, not a distinct frontier-science bet.

Annual gifts to Chile’s children’s-disability telethon (~$5.5M) and a family foundation funding a local school — modest relative to a $47B fortune, and purely domestic/local, not frontier research.

Founded 1983, focused on Ferrero employees and retirees (scholarships, healthcare, social programs) rather than external causes. Giovanni Ferrero’s personal giving is deliberately low-profile and undisclosed in amount.

Led a $10M round into an Australian biotech growing living brain cells into "biocomputers" — literally biological brain-computer interfaces, the same gap Musk’s Neuralink surfaces from a completely different technical direction.

Broader venture arm with a stated focus on regenerative medicine and cell therapy across 200+ portfolio companies — $350M raised recently for continued deep-tech investment.

A $7.7B (RMB 50B) corporate pledge spanning healthcare, rural revitalization, education, and renewable energy — announced in 2021 alongside rising Chinese regulatory scrutiny of Big Tech. Too broad to map to one problem, and driven partly by political pressure rather than personal conviction alone.

A $15B self-funded impact platform across climate, sustainable food systems, and ocean conservation — one of the largest single individual commitments to impact investing anywhere.

Reef restoration (Coral Vita micro-fragmentation), sustainable seaweed farming, and Bahamas nature-bond projects — the ocean/marine-ecosystem gap this session’s /coverage audit already flagged from SDG14, now independently validated by real capital.

€100M pledged over 5 years for Tyrolean forest rewilding, plus a separate €250M fund backing startups in reusable packaging, green logistics, and athlete-nutrition science.

Marine ecosystem restoration, coastal-community healthcare, and disaster relief — including funding a new hospital ship with Mercy Ships. Same ocean/marine gap Lukas Walton’s Builders Vision surfaces, independently, from shipping wealth rather than retail wealth.

Chair of the MSC Foundation board — same family foundation as Rafaela Aponte-Diamant, marine conservation and humanitarian relief.

University and hospital funding — $112M and $22M respectively — plus HELP Logistics, which trains public-health logisticians in Malawi on vaccine cold-chain delivery. That last piece is a real, if small, infectious-disease-delivery bet.

Disaster relief and education giving — modest and undisclosed in full amount relative to net worth. His well-known tech-driven pig farm is a business venture, not disclosed philanthropy.

Deliberately private philanthropy; this and gifts to Doctors Without Borders and the Children’s Defense Fund are the only disclosed pieces.

Part of a $1B total MIT commitment — the single largest computing/AI investment by an American academic institution, 50 new faculty hired. A third billionaire on the AI compute infrastructure gap, after Son and Schwarz, via education/research rather than data centers.

Multi-generational family foundation (founded 1965 by her father and grandfather, not her alone) — $500M+ cumulative across arts, education, health, and national parks.

Local Nashville community and arts giving (Frist Center for the Visual Arts) — modest relative to net worth, no distinct frontier-science bet found.

$100M/year across education, healthcare, and cancer treatment centers in rural India — a fourth billionaire on the cancer gap, and the first via treatment delivery rather than research.

A $428M science fund launched 2023, explicitly focused on AI and climate research — separate from his broader $1.1B in conventional Chinese charitable giving (elderly care, poverty alleviation).

Over $4B given since 1994 for flexible, long-horizon basic research in math and the sciences — one of the largest basic-science funders in the US, plus a $500M gift to Stony Brook in 2024.

$725M+ pledged to autism research since 2003, started after her daughter’s diagnosis — a distinct neurodevelopmental-research gap, not on the index.

$2B pledged with his wife Penny in 2025 — the single largest gift ever to a US university, college, or health institution. A third billionaire on the cancer gap, after Ellison and Julia Koch, at ten times either of their gifts.

Education, child health, and poverty alleviation — $25M to Harvard, £15M to a London children’s hospital. Broad conventional giving, no distinct frontier bet.

$1.7B+ cumulative, primarily VidyaGyan — free boarding schools for gifted rural children across Uttar Pradesh. India’s most generous individual donor four of the last five years; education access, not frontier research.

$500M+ across the Samueli Schools of Engineering at UCLA and UC Irvine and a college of integrative health sciences — university-building, not a distinct frontier-science bet.

$125M over 5 years for a fellowship on beneficial/trustworthy AI. A fifth billionaire on the AI compute infrastructure gap, after Son, Schwarz, Schwarzman, and — from the research-safety angle rather than hardware — this one closest in spirit to the AI-safety welfare-problem this index already excluded by deliberate decision.

Partners with Schmidt Sciences on the Ocean Biogeochemistry Virtual Institute — a fourth billionaire on the ocean/marine-ecosystem gap, after Walton and both Apontes.

Sustained support for Prof. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro’s cancer research at Tel Aviv University, alongside a $42M gift to London Business School (education, not frontier). A fifth billionaire on the cancer gap, after Ellison, Julia Koch, Savitri Jindal, and Phil Knight.

Arts and museum funding (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, $5M) alongside general education and healthcare giving — conventional, not a distinct frontier bet.

Local Memphis youth development, education, and health programs tied to his NBA team ownership — modest and low-profile relative to net worth.

Established 2025 for education, community development, and assistance to those in need — new, undisclosed in amount, and the company itself only just IPO’d.

Education and healthcare giving through a family foundation with $30.5M in assets — modest relative to a $30.9B fortune, low public profile.

$1B pledged through 2026 for women’s political and economic power, plus a further $600M specifically for women’s reproductive and midlife health. Directly fills the gender-inequality gap the /coverage audit flagged from the SDGs — the clearest match on this whole page between a billionaire’s giving and a named taxonomy gap.

€30M to the BMW Foundation alongside Susanne Klatten, plus board involvement in Stiftung Charité’s life-sciences funding programs.

A 17,000-piece art collection displayed across free-admission museums in six European countries — cultural patronage, no disclosed dollar figure, not a research or welfare bet.

$30M multi-year commitment funding early-career scientists across the US, UK, and Israel, plus a £75M (~$114M) gift that founded Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government — roughly $500M in disclosed giving total, concentrated on accelerating scientific output.

€88M across 95 nonprofit projects via SKala, plus board-level funding of Charité’s life-sciences research programs alongside Stefan Quandt.

Rural teacher training (100 teachers/yr, $75M+ pledged) and Xixi Wetland conservation ($14.26M) — real but modest relative to net worth, domestic and conventional.

The largest and most unusual philanthropic commitment on this entire page: $26.2B given away since 2019 across 2,700+ grants, all unrestricted — no strings, no reporting requirements, full trust in the grantee. Causes are broad and established (not a frontier-science bet), but the giving methodology itself is genuinely novel.

Africa’s largest private foundation ($1.25B endowment, +$700M since). A $100M joint program with the Gates Foundation treats childhood malnutrition in Nigeria — the same gap flagged as a draft candidate on this site’s own /admin/candidates queue, independently validated by Africa’s richest person.

$7M seeded into ~24 hard-science biotech companies since 2011 via Breakout Labs, plus $3.5M to the Methuselah Foundation and direct support for SENS — anti-aging research, in the same spirit as Bezos’s Altos Labs and Page/Brin’s Calico bets.

$5.6B in downtown Detroit real estate development (Bedrock) plus a dedicated $500M, 10-year commitment to Detroit neighborhoods (property-tax debt relief, community investment) — place-based urban revitalization, a pattern distinct from every other entry on this page: it blurs real-estate investment and philanthropy rather than sitting cleanly in either.

The largest individual donation ever given to a Chinese university — basic research across math, physics, chemistry, plus computer-science innovation and talent cultivation, at his alma mater.

Long-standing, quiet support for electrical-engineering education at his alma maters — no single large disclosed figure, modest relative to a $28B fortune.

$182M non-profit university (VinUni), plus VinFuture, a global science and technology prize he founded for breakthrough innovations benefiting humanity — a real, if young, entrant in the same category as the Nobel Prizes.

A significant, sustained portfolio of Parkinson’s disease research and patient care at leading universities and institutes worldwide — a fourth billionaire on the neurodegenerative-disease gap, after Brin, Gates, and Bettencourt Meyers.

KRW 1.5 trillion (~$1.1B) endowed over 10 years for basic science, materials engineering, and information-technology research — 517 research projects funded to date at Korean universities and public institutes.

200 billion won (~$150M) to update the research center and equipment at Korea’s national infectious-disease research institute, alongside 300 billion won for pediatric cancer and rare-disease treatment.

Oxford University’s largest-ever gift for vaccines research, from the founder of the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume (1.3B+ doses). About as direct a match to this index’s infectious-disease problem as any bet on this page.

Environment, human rights, women’s issues, and Holocaust education (Keene State College) — real but modest grants, well under $10M/yr disclosed, relative to a $26B fortune. Deliberately low public profile.

A translational precision-medicine research hub, part of $100M+ in disclosed giving concentrated on medical research through the Englander Foundation.

Rural healthcare infrastructure and medicine access for underserved communities in India — delivering existing, proven healthcare at scale, not funding new frontier research.

Royal Flying Doctor Service ($6M), St Vincent’s Hospital redevelopment ($5M), and ~$10M/yr to Australian rowing, swimming, and beach volleyball ($80M+ cumulative since 2012) — real domestic giving, concentrated on rural health access and sport, not frontier research.

CMOC (China Molybdenum), the Yu-chaired mining group behind his fortune, discloses only modest community spending — RMB 3.21M on education programs in 2023 across all its global operations. No personal foundation or individually attributed gift with a disclosed dollar figure surfaces for Yu Yong himself.

Long-time general counsel of Tether and Bitfinex (retired as GC in early 2025, remains an Ifinex equityholder). Extremely private: no foundation, pledge, or gift with a disclosed dollar figure surfaces in public records, unlike almost every other billionaire at this rank.

CATL, the battery giant Huang co-founded and helped lead until stepping back from operating roles in 2022, and its chairman Zeng Yuquan disclosed roughly RMB 1.6B ($220M+) in combined giving 2018-2022 across education, poverty alleviation, and disaster relief — but the underlying reporting attributes essentially all of it to Zeng personally and to the company, not to Huang. No individually attributed gift or personal foundation tied to Huang Shilin was found.

Her own vehicle (est. 2018, independent of the main Walton Family Foundation, where she no longer sits on the board), funding “ocean vitality” and land/water stewardship centered on Baja California Sur, Mexico. Grantmaking grew from $1.4M (2019) to $27M (2023) on a $138M endowment — a fifth billionaire on this page’s ocean/marine gap, after both Waltons (Lukas), the Apontes, and Schmidt.

Textile-industry sustainability, circularity, and social-inclusion programs, funded entirely by the Persson family since the foundation went independent in 2013 — steady corporate-adjacent philanthropy, not frontier research.

Domestic Russian giving to elderly care, family and children’s support, and culture/sport. TASS cites Forbes Russia ranking it among the country’s largest private charity foundations, but neither outlet discloses a specific annual dollar figure. EU/US-sanctioned since 2014.

$55M in 2004 (then the largest gift in CMU history) plus $67M in 2013 to build a new home for the business school that bears his name — classic naming-rights, alma-mater giving, not frontier research.

Roughly A$3M/yr in disclosed giving, including support for Jewish immigration to Israel via the Shorashim Center, plus one-off gifts like A$5,000 to each of the 99 Australian medal winners at the Tokyo Olympics — modest and steady relative to a $23B fortune, not frontier research.

A $275M pledge (2016) built a national network of free mental-health clinics for veterans and their families, paired with Cohen Veterans Bioscience — a nonprofit funding biomarker and diagnostic research for PTSD and traumatic brain injury that the VA and pharma haven’t prioritized.

Widely reported as reluctant to give personally — his largest documented personal gift is roughly $1M (in memory of Milly Dowler), plus smaller five- and six-figure gifts (a Stony Brook journalism center, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation). His company, News Corp, has been more generous: $20M to the Motion Picture & Television Fund. Industry-adjacent prestige giving, not frontier research.

Broadcom’s co-founder (federal stock-options and drug charges both later resolved without conviction) has quietly put more than $57.7M into free after-school tutoring, SAT prep, and college-admissions support for under-resourced high schoolers in Santa Ana, California — a direct-service bet on educational access rather than research.

The Group’s CSR arm, chaired by his mother Rajashree Birla, runs 42 schools and roughly 18–24 hospitals across India, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Egypt on more than Rs 500 crore in global CSR investment — steady, broad-based corporate giving across established causes, not a bet on any single underserved frontier.

A $61M-asset Phoenix foundation funding Arizona education and health causes, including a University of Arizona childhood-disease research grant (the PANDA program) and the Brian Garcia Welcome Center at Phoenix’s homelessness campus, named for his late son. Modest and local relative to a $22.7B fortune.

Launched December 30, 2024 alongside BYD’s 30th anniversary and its 10-millionth EV, funding scholarships at 100+ Chinese universities plus NEV-technology exhibits donated to 28 science museums — explicitly framed as building China’s next generation of battery and EV engineers.

$25M spread across hometown communities nationwide for the chain’s 25th anniversary in 2021, plus one-off gifts like $1M for 2025 Texas flood relief via the American Red Cross — branded, feel-good local philanthropy rather than a bet on any research frontier.

Named in memory of his wife Inger, who died of cancer in 2006 — the same year the family gave 50 million NOK to Oslo’s Radium Hospital. Norwegian press reports "hundreds of millions" more in NOK to cardiac and oncology research there since the early 2000s: a rare disclosed-dollar commitment from an otherwise famously press-shy shipping magnate.

Since 2011 has funneled 10% of Baofeng’s annual profit into scholarships and subsidies for poor families across Ningxia, one of China’s poorest provinces — RMB 302M personally donated in 2019 alone, on a path toward a pledged RMB 6 billion (~$940M) total, aimed squarely at breaking multi-generational rural poverty through education access.

Founded a foundation in 2016 for gifted-student STEM education (the Sirius network, Mendeleev Olympiad); his companies report roughly $500M in cumulative "charitable programs." The most striking recent disclosed figure — 32 billion rubles paid to Putin’s Sirius educational center in 2023 — was reported by The Economist to have coincided with prosecutors dropping a bid to seize his coal company, Sibeco: giving with a legal-settlement flavor, not pure discretionary philanthropy.

A family foundation making modest, growing grants — 79 grants totaling $19.6M since inception, annual giving up from $3.1M in 2020 to $7.3M in 2023 — plus a standing $16.5M commitment (2009–2041) to youth programs in Arlington, the Cowboys’ home city. Classic team-owner civic giving, family name on the building included.

A $100M initiative launched in 2018 to track illegal global fishing fleets and build a marine research station at Exmouth on Australia’s Ningaloo Reef — part of $1.8B+ the Forrests have given to Minderoo since 2001, including a record $5B share donation in 2023, the largest single charitable gift in Australian history.

A$75M of a record A$400M pledge (2017) went specifically to reward international collaboration among cancer research institutes — an unusual funding structure aimed at breaking down the silo problem in cancer research rather than funding any single lab.

Donated $3M to USC’s men’s golf program in 2015; his son was admitted as a walk-on golfer through a special athletics admissions track days later, despite grades an admissions officer called "mediocre at best." One of dozens of cases detailed in a 2024 Los Angeles Times investigation into wealthy families buying admission through minor sports.

Personally paid HK$303M (~US$38.7M) at a 2019 Christie’s Hong Kong evening sale for Sanyu’s Five Nudes, a world auction record for the Chinese-French modernist — bought back into his own YAGEO Foundation collection, which he plans to house in a private museum outside Taipei.

After a deepened religious faith following King Slide’s difficult IPO years, donated NT$20M (~US$650K) toward rebuilding the Huixian Temple’s Tiangong Hall (his daughter and son-in-law gave a further NT$20M+); also funds a small scholarship at Dahu Elementary, his childhood school. Taiwan’s newly-minted richest man remains otherwise intensely private about giving relative to his $17B+ fortune.

Since 2005, the family foundation has funded a scholarship track bringing top mainland Chinese students from remote provinces to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, plus need-based aid for local students; the foundation has run 80+ charitable projects across nearly 30 universities since inception.

Stripe (Collison is president) co-launched Frontier in 2022 with Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey: a pre-purchase commitment to buy verified carbon removal from early-stage startups to de-risk a nascent market, growing out of Stripe’s original $1M/year carbon-removal purchasing commitment started in 2019.

Co-founded with economist Tyler Cowen in 2020 after concluding NIH grant cycles moved too slowly for a pandemic; funded 260+ COVID-19 research projects with $10K-$500K awards for variant sequencing, repurposed-drug trials, and rapid testing, turning around in days instead of the usual hundreds.

Co-founded in 2021 with Stanford/UC Berkeley scientists Patrick Hsu and Silvana Konermann: an independent nonprofit biomedical research institute giving scientists unrestricted, multi-year funding outside the standard NIH grant-application grind, seeded by Collison alongside Vitalik Buterin and Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna’s Good Ventures.

Signed the Giving Pledge in 2010; has given nearly $4B to his foundation to date (endowment ~$5B as of 2024), with roughly 80% staying in Tulsa to fund early-childhood poverty programs including Educare early-learning centers and the Tulsa Remote cash-incentive relocation program.

Funded through GKFF; believed to be the largest single gift to a public park in U.S. history, opened 2018 along the Arkansas River in Tulsa.

Launched in 2021 to mark Schaeffler Group’s 75th anniversary, funded by Schaeffler AG and IHO Holding (the family holding company Schaeffler controls) with initial capital plus ongoing annual commitments, focused on climate and environmental protection, research and science, and education.

Corporate donations during the pandemic: €1M to the German Red Cross and €800K to first-responder organizations in China (2020).

Donated $15M in 2008 to fund the Menard Center for Emergency Care and the Menard Transformational Fund for Education at Luther Midelfort in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

The Menard family gave $5.5M to endow the Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth at NDSU, supporting free-market economics research and teaching.