I went to the Skoll World Forum last week looking for billionaires.
Not that I expected to run into flesh-and-blood specimens — Oxford is lovely, but apparently lacks the charms of Davos or Sun Valley — but I was curious if the world’s wealthiest would show up in the discussions.
Billionaires, after all, accounted for “almost 38%” of global giving in 2022, according to Wealth-X, a percentage that has likely risen since. More recent data shows that about half of America’s richest 25 foundations are backed by living billionaires, by my count, even though many of the biggest donors do not have foundations. And if my conversations with dozens of nonprofits over the years are any guide, most fundraisers are doing everything they can to get their foot in the door with the ultra-rich.
Heck, all one had to do to be reminded of near-ubiquitous billionaire influence was wander around the Skoll World Forum reading signs and nametags. The conference’s main site is a business school named for Wafic Saïd (estimated wealth $1.6 billion, according to the Saudi Times). Go to an off-site session and you might pass a humanities center named for Stephen Schwarzman ($40 billion, according to Forbes). Then there’s all the philanthropic reps that show up on behalf of folks like George Soros ($7.5 billion), Christopher Hohn ($12 billion), and Laurene Powell Jobs ($14 billion). The whole event is, of course, named for Jeff Skoll ($5.3 billion).
Yet throughout the week I was struck by the fleeting nature of every reference I heard to that reality. Here and there, people — mostly moderators — mentioned inequality, capital or even billions of dollars flowing into the sector. But the conversation always seemed to quickly move on.
Granted, it’s possible that I missed these conversations, despite searching the agenda for them. But what seemed telling was that session after session in my itinerary ended up in deep analysis of other important topics, particularly artificial intelligence or USAID fallout, but only ever glancingly touched upon billionaires (who, incidentally, are not uninvolved in USAID’s demise or AI’s future).
One of the only direct references I heard to this topic from the main stage — which across two plenaries featured about a dozen speakers — was by comedian Trevor Noah. He was discussing artificial intelligence with Noubar Afeyan ($1.9 billion, according to Forbes), cofounder and chairman of Moderna and cofounder of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative.
“Is it going to exacerbate the wealth gap? Is it going to make things worse, and the richest of the rich just continue to become richer?” Noah asked. “Or does it become this superpower that enables a small farmholder in Kenya to maximize his crop?”
“I do think it’s going to empower the masses,” Afeyan said. “But I’m paranoid to the extent that some people will try to hog all that capability and limit its distribution.”
After that, the conversation moved on, though it first touched on Afeyan’s belief that the best metaphor for AI’s impact is punctuated evolution, the biological theory that species go through long periods of stasis and brief bursts of change. Which is funny to me because that sounds like an apt frame to think about what is happening to philanthropy: After decades of legacy foundation predominance, the growing billionaire class is driving a period of rapid sector transformation.
Perhaps I’m just a reporter with a one-track mind. But another session I attended showed that one of the top figures in traditional institutional philanthropy is very aware of this power shift — namely, Heather Gerken, the new president of the Ford Foundation.
The moderator, Raj Kumar, president and editor-in-chief of Devex, set the stage. “There is so much more money coming into philanthropy. A number of leaders of [the] AI revolution are avowed philanthropists, effective altruists — and we’re expecting many billions to get donated through them,” along with others such as the Buffett family, he said. What does that mean for legacy funders like Ford?
Gerken, who now heads a $17 billion institution, responded: “Day 2, I realized my job is to be a fundraiser. That’s maybe the most important thing I’m doing.”
She went on to talk about what legacy funders can do to maintain their influence. One option: providing nonprofits with a “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval” to guide the funding decisions of billionaire outfits with little or no staff. That seems relevant to, say, the Rockefeller Foundation. But the fact that even Ford’s leader is focused on getting money out of billionaires seems relevant to everyone.
The impact of this power dynamic on the wider world of nonprofits and social impact deserves air time, and venues like the Skoll World Forum — one of the most influential civil sector conferences in Europe, if not the world — seem like important places for that discussion.
For all that conferences like Skoll do to inspire and connect, raising money is clearly one of the primary draws. The Skoll Foundation itself uses the event to show off its grantees — just as foundations do at conferences everywhere — in the hope that other funders will give them money. And nonprofits that come — paying for flights, accommodation and an entrance ticket price that multiple people bemoaned to me — do so because they are hoping attending will, at least eventually, get them some money.
You could see this dynamic on full display on the main stage when Francis Collins, who served as the director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents, and led the project that mapped the human genome, unabashedly used his remarks to pitch not one, but two organizations.
“The plan is there, the business is ready to go — we just need a little more money,” he said with a chuckle, referring to GenCoE, a network of African scientists. “I’m hoping this will be a week that some of those things get people’s attention.” Memorably, he was then handed a guitar and launched into song.
I didn’t see anyone else try a sing-for-your-supper routine — Collins did set a high bar — but he was not alone in hoping it would be a pivotal week. A comment I heard at an off-site session on philanthropy summed up the situation well.
“I suspect lots of people are in this room because they want to try and find out how to get money,” said a participant. “Another one or two people in this room have money and are working at how to spend it.”
Such power dynamics are central to philanthropy, and far predate the billionaire boom. But now the whole sector seems to have its hand out. And if America is any guide — where on one coast, a billionaire president and his cabinet run the federal government and on the other, a billionaire tax will feature on the ballot alongside a billionaire governor candidate — this dynamic is not going away soon.
To be clear: Skoll is not alone in treading lightly around the 10-figure elephants in the room. The sector I cover closest, climate philanthropy, is also wary of addressing the topic — and in some cases, even avoids use of the word “billionaire” or synonyms — even though billionaire foundations dominate the sector and billionaires’ entry into climate has been the biggest funding story for years. Heck, this week, IP published an op-ed about how the effects of extreme wealth comprise “philanthropy’s blind spot.”
I doubt that nonprofits and philanthropy will be able — and here, I’m going to borrow the buzzwords used in so much of Skoll’s agenda — to mobilize leadership, drive change and move capital without actually discussing one group of capital-rich leaders driving change, i.e., billionaires. When that group has become so influential that the Ford Foundation’s president believes her most important role may be as a fundraiser, it seems like it’s time to talk about it.
Michael Kavate covers climate philanthropy and billionaire donors. He welcomes all feedback, and tips.
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