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philanthropy
How Billionaires Like Marc Benioff Use Philanthropy To Skirt Around Public Scrutiny
Benioff has given over $1 billion to San Francisco, but this money has an agenda: to keep critics off his back.
Oct 23, 2025
Marc Benioff is a classic case of a bad-faith billionaire philanthropist. He donates hundreds of millions of dollars to the communities he lives in—San Francisco and the Big Island of Hawaii—to skirt around public scrutiny.
Benioff, a Bay-Area native whose net worth hovers under $9 billion, and his company Salesforce have donated over $1 billion to San Francisco—as of October this year. As for Hawaii, where Benioff bought land in 2000, he and his wife Lynne have graciously given $250 million in philanthropy. Most of this money has gone to building or expanding hospitals.
But his philanthropy has an agenda: to keep critics off his back.
Another big-money billionaire, Mark Cuban, whose net worth sits around $6 billion, shared his thoughts on philanthropic efforts like Benioff’s over the weekend during an episode of Real Time with Bill Mahr. Sitting beside Andrew Ross Sorkin, Cuban said he prefers to donate anonymously and questions the intentions of those who do differently.
Instead of focusing his time crafting an apology, Benioff used his shot to yell about how much money he has given to the community.
“Why would you put your name on a building or a hospital if not for leverage, for power, for influence?” he said.
Well said, Mr. Cuban. Power, influence, leverage–and an opportunity to excuse bad behavior–are exactly what Mr. Benioff seeks in spending so much, tax-deductable, money on children’s hospitals with his name plastered on the side.
This became clear in the aftermath of Benioff’s poorly received–yet hardly surprising–comments to the New York Times earlier this month, in which he suggested his former-foe-now-friend, President Donald Trump, send the National Guard to San Francisco.
“We don’t have enough cops, so if they can be cops, I’m all for it,” Benioff said.
The fallout was immediate. Local leaders condemned his comments, and Ron Conway, a Democratic donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist, publicly resigned from Salesforce Inc.’s Philanthropic Foundation.
“It saddens me immensely to say that with your recent comments, and failure to understand their impact, I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway said in an email to Benioff last week.
Benioff, for his part, has been trying to walk back his comments—by bragging about how much money he has donated to San Francisco: “No one is doing more philanthropy in San Francisco this year than I am,” he told the San Francisco Standard after his controversial comments hit airwaves across the country. “Nobody has given more than my family. Nobody has given more than my company.”
Instead of focusing his time crafting an apology, Benioff used his shot to yell about how much money he has given to the community.
And this isn’t the first time he’s tried using his philanthropy to get out of hot water. When NPR reporter Dana Kerr went to report on Benioff in Hawaii—and his suspicious spending spree on real estate—the billionaire tried to persuade her into writing a positive story.
“He started texting me all the time. His texts were all about the philanthropy that he’s doing in Hawaii… He also connected me with people who know about his donations so I could talk to them,” Kerr said on an NPR podcast in March 2024. “The whole thing really felt like a pressure campaign.”
Sounds similar to his strategy with the SF Standard last week: reminding reporters of his philanthropic history to deter criticism. What happened to honesty–or apologies?
Benioff waited an entire week before apologizing for his National Guard comments–on where else but X.
But the damage is done. Reverberations from his mini scandal remain around the country. Questions of whether Trump is going too far, even for Republicans, by sending the National Guard to blue cities abound.
During a televised mayoral debate in New York City last week, all three contenders—Democrat Zohran Mamdani, Independent Andrew Cuomo, and GOP candidate Curtis Silwa—said they would not support Trump sending the National Guard to the city’s streets as mayor.
Trump has, so far, sent the National Guard to “fight crime” in five US cities—all led by Democratic mayors: Washington, DC; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago, Illinois. Lawmakers from those states have said military presence is not necessary, except for Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee.
The president continues to threaten other cities with military presence, and in some cases, has taken it a step further: In Boston, led by Mayor Michelle Wu, he’s raised the idea of moving the FIFA World Cup. (Trump is good pals with FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who was curiously present at the Gaza Peace Summit.)
Meanwhile, Benioff’s magazine Time, which he purchased in 2018 “to help address a crisis of Trust,” just put Trump on its cover for the second time this year.
Trump, however, hates the picture.
“Time Magazine wrote a relatively good story about me, but the picture may be the Worst of All Time,” the president wrote on Truth Social in the early hours of Wednesday.
While our commander in chief addressed his cover photo, he has yet to comment directly on Benioff’s request. Instead, he’s built up a lie around the billionaire’s contentious comments, citing, falsely, that “government officials” in California have called for the National Guard’s deployment.
“We have great support in San Francisco,” Trump told FBI Director Kash Patel at a White House conference this week. “So, I’d like to recommend that for inclusion, maybe in your next group.”
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Real-Life Scrooges Are Hoarding Charitable Donations in Foundations and Funds
Current rules enable wealthy donors to bank their tax break immediately, but the donated funds may remain sidelined for decades.
Dec 05, 2024
For as long as we can remember, the end of the calendar year has marked the start of America’s giving season.
The holidays that light up our darkest months also invite us to celebrate (and practice!) generosity. Food banks, youth groups, arts and civic organizations, and community service programs heavily depend on the support they receive in November and December.
Year-end giving is big for tax purposes, but many people donate without regard to whether they’ll get a deduction. In fact, fewer than 10% of donors claim a tax deduction for charitable giving.
So, big donors: You want a tax break? Make sure the money gets to a working charity—and fast.
The super-wealthy, who do take advantage of itemizing their tax returns, give differently. They give more to large hospitals and universities, where you can get your name on a building. That kind of giving can be valuable too.
But a less visible difference is crucial to recognize.
Increasingly, wealthy donors are parking money in entities they control, like private foundations and donor advised funds (DAFs). These intermediaries then, in theory, donate money to working charities.
But private foundations are only required to “payout” 5% of their assets a year to these other charities. And DAFs have no requirement to payout at all. So wealthy donors bank their tax break immediately, but the donated funds may remain sidelined for decades.
According to a new report we co-authored, Gilded Giving 2024: Saving Philanthropy from Wall Street, over 35% of all charitable donations now go to one of these two intermediaries.
There’s now $1.7 trillion parked in private foundations and DAFs—money that could be flowing to working charities in a timely way to solve problems. We estimate that by 2028, half of all donations will go to private foundations and DAFs.
As wealth has concentrated in fewer hands over the last four decades, so has this kind of dubiously “charitable” giving—a trend we call “top-heavy philanthropy.” And it’s increasingly profitable for financial advisers to the ultra rich.
Wall Street financiers promote DAFs as a way for donors to receive immediate tax reductions in the year they give, but then they sit on those funds and collect wealth management fees. The financiers have no financial incentive to ever see the money go to a mental health center, food bank, community theater, or other working charity. It’s more profitable for them to keep assets under management.
The rest of us subsidize this system. For every dollar a billionaire donates to charity, including to their own foundation or DAF, the rest of us chip in up to 74 cents in the form of lost tax revenue.
So how did we get a charity system that works for multi-millionaire donors and wealth managers but not for nonprofit charities, small donors, and the taxpaying public? In part, it’s because lobbyists for the financial industry and DAF sponsors fight vigorously against any change.
But a growing coalition of donors, nonprofit charities, and people who care about tax fairness are pushing back. They point out that lawmakers could easily fix the rules to increase the flow of charitable funding, increase transparency, and shut down the tax avoidance and self-dealing practices currently corrupting philanthropy.
The message is getting across. A 2024 Ipsos poll found that 71% of respondents believe Congress should raise the annual payout rate for private foundations and require the same for DAFs. Across the political spectrum, a clear majority of Americans believe if a donor gets a tax break, they should move the money in a timely way to a working charity.
So, big donors: You want a tax break? Make sure the money gets to a working charity—and fast. You want other taxpayers to subsidize your giving preferences? Tell us where the money’s going.
Don’t like these rules? Then don’t ask the rest of us to subsidize it. Let’s make sure the season of giving actually centers on giving, not hoarding.
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For Wall Street-Fueled Philanthropy Industry, Every Day Is Giving Tuesday
"The financial industry aggressively markets DAFs for uncharitable reasons: advantages as tax avoidance vehicles, especially for complex assets; no payout requirements—and secrecy to donors and grantees alike," said one of the report's authors.
Dec 03, 2024
A new report released on this year's philanthropic holiday known as Giving Tuesday details how the "profit motives of the financial services sector have increasingly and disastrously warped how charitable giving functions."
The analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies—titled "Gilded Giving 2024: Saving Philanthropy from Wall Street"—shows how donor-advised funds (DAFs) increasingly serve the economic interests of donors and the Wall Street firms that manage the funds, rather than the interests of nonprofit charities.
Rather than donate to a cause directly, wealthy people have the option to donate to foundations or DAFs, which can be sponsored by for-profit wealth management firms like Fidelity Investments or Charles Schwab. Firms like Fidelity Investments, in turn, benefit from being able to offer this type of service to wealthy clients.
"At last count," according to the report's authors, "DAFs and foundations together take in 35 percent of all individual giving in the U.S." If they continue to grow at the rate they have for the past five years, they're expected to take in half of all individual giving in the country by 2028.
Why is this a problem? For one thing, according to the report, some of the money that's intended for donation is scraped up by the DAFs and foundations, meaning that dollars meant for a cause are diverted elsewhere.
"With each passing year, an additional 2 cents of each dollar donated by individuals is funneled into intermediaries and away from working charities. Assuming that their assets will grow at the same rate they have over the past five years, the assets held in DAFs and foundations will eclipse $2 trillion by 2026," according to the report's authors.
What's more, there is no requirement that DAFs disburse their assets, according to the report's authors—meaning there's no guarantee the money is given to charity, and in practice the money in these accounts tends to move slowly, often generating gains instead of being dispersed.
DAFs also facilitate anonymous giving, because donations from them need only be credited to their sponsors, not the original person directing the contribution, according to Inequality.org, a project of IPS.
The report's authors argue that DAFs are part of a wider “wealth defense industry” — tax lawyers, accountants, and wealth managers whose interests are more geared towards helping their clients increase assets, minimize taxes, maximize wealth transfer to descendants, and net some of those assets for themselves in the form of fees, as opposed to supporting charitable causes.
DAFS are used strategically in this way, for example, by giving donors the ability to dispose of noncash assets, according to the report. In practice, this means that DAF donors can give stocks, real estate and other noncash assets directly to DAFS when markets are doing well, meaning they are able to get income tax deductions from their contribution while side stepping paying capital gains tax on appreciation of those assets.
"The financial industry aggressively markets DAFs for uncharitable reasons: advantages as tax avoidance vehicles, especially for complex assets; no payout requirements—and secrecy to donors and grantees alike," said Chuck Collins, co-author of the report and director of the Charity Reform Initiative at IPS.
Other key insights from the study include:
- Tech companies are offering DAF-related platforms, apps, and widgets in order to make DAF granting, and by extension charitable giving, more "frictionless." Yet, these companies, also promote DAFs to advisors and donors in terms of tax efficiency and their ability to help investment advisors "maintain AUM"—or assets under management.
- That the financial industry is "blurr[ing] the distinction between investment and philanthropy." Investors will talk about philanthropy as part of a wider portfolio of financial behaviors, as opposed to something fundamentally different—"something that, by its nature, requires individuals to relinquish personal interest and control."
The report recommends a number of reforms in order to take back philanthropy from Wall Street, including enacting regulations that would ensure donations reach working charities on reasonable timelines, undertaking {agreement} reforms to eliminate "shell games and tax dodges that financial advisors craft to diminish and delay the flow of funds to qualified charities," organizing a coalition of interested partners that would apply pressure on Congress and state governments to take action, and uplifting good examples of DAF sponsors who facilitate steady and generous giving despite gaps in the law.
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