Lady Business: Warren, MacKenzie, Elon, and my year of covering billionaire philanthropy

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 144th issue, published December 21, 2022.

Redefining Generosity

A little over a year ago, I started reporting on MacKenzie Scott, the writer and former spouse of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, turned reclusive billionaire, turned stunningly generous (if still reclusive!) philanthropist. Little did I know at the time that billionaires and their wildly variable philanthropic endeavors would become one of 2022’s biggest business stories.

There was Elon Musk, whose chaotic takeover of Twitter and ongoing efforts to dismantle it overshadowed his tremendous philanthropic generosity. Or was it? Musk late last year marked $5.7 billion worth of Tesla shares as donations for “charity,” making him the second-most-generous U.S. philanthropist in 2021. But, as I reported when Musk’s gift became public early this year, there was no evidence of him actually giving the money away–and, sure enough, tax records disclosed this month showed that the biggest recipient of his charity was … his personal foundation. The biggest beneficiary of Musk’s philanthropy indeed turned out to be Musk, and the lovely tax writeoff he got from the donation.

Then there was Sam Bankman-Fried, the ubiquitous crypto savior turned jailed (yet still somehow ubiquitous) crypto fraudster, whose non-video-gaming sideline was promoting the “effective altruism” philanthropic movement. I sat out most of the S.B.F. coverage, both before and after the implosion of his companies, and have few regrets! The man is getting plenty of media oxygen regardless, and doesn’t seem at risk of having his supply reduced anytime soon.

But I did spend some of the last month reporting on the original Warren Buffett. The 92-year-old legendary investor is one of the most generous and influential philanthropists of our time. He’s pledged to give away 99% of his wealth, currently valued at more than $100 billion; he co-founded the Giving Pledge, exhorting other billionaires to follow his example; and he’s given almost $5 billion to charity in 2022 alone.

Yet he made some of that money at BNSF, the massive U.S. railroad owned by Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, which effectively doesn’t give its workers paid sick leave. The showdown over those working conditions–and the narrowly averted railroad strike earlier this month–highlighted a mounting disconnect not only for Buffett, but for most of his billionaire philanthropist peers, as I reported in a Fortune feature published last week: “There are inherent contradictions in philanthropy—and they’re contradictions that some folks are more willing than others to really wrestle with,” says Aaron Dorfman, executive director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a left-leaning research nonprofit.

Which brings me back to MacKenzie Scott, and her seemingly genuine efforts to wrestle with some of these contradictions–and the other (if relatively few) criticisms her philanthropy attracts. Scott has, in three short years, given away more than $14 billion to more than 1,600 nonprofits. She’s not just in it for the tax writeoff: You can now search through a new online database of gifts to external nonprofits her team unveiled last week, a year after she promised to become more transparent in her donations.

Most intriguingly to me, Scott also appears to be changing course in response to some of the concerns Fortune highlighted in our profile of her, published in March: Her new website promises to start accepting online applications from nonprofits seeking her money. Eventually:
 

The website also appears to address another criticism that Fortune highlighted in our reporting earlier this year: Scott’s lack of availability to those with good reason to seek her money, and the difficulties this lack of accessibility can cause for those she’s trying to help. For example, at national organizations with many affiliates across the country, she has funded some affiliates but not others—without asking those nonprofits for input—occasionally creating internal difficulties and confusion for her recipients.

“It was really difficult to know what their criteria was—and sure, I’d love to be able to provide input,” Rey Saldaña, CEO of Communities in Schools, told Fortune earlier this year. His network of nonprofits in November 2021 received a surprise phone call from a member of Scott’s team, promising grants that eventually totalled $133.5 million, for the national organization and 40 of its 110 affiliates; but for the 70 other affiliates, Saldaña acknowledged, “the conversation was a difficult one. It stings to be on the outside when others in the network are receiving gifts.”

It appears that Scott is taking that kind of feedback to heart—and, as she has so often done over her relatively short philanthropic career, has quickly changed course to build a better approach.

This willingness to iterate and listen to legitimate critiques of her approach–while continuing to give away gobs of money at high speed–appears to set Scott apart, yet again, in the ranks of megadonors.

So it’s been a wild 2022 for billionaire philanthropy, as I wrote on Elon’s website last week. But I suspect it's just the start of reckoning with the vast influence–and contradictions–of the world’s wealthiest and would-be generous people.

Lady Bits

It’s been a while since I’ve put together one of this recommendation lists, so here are a few things that I particularly enjoyed this fall:

–On the English-language pronunciation of Qatar, "what sort of wrong is right?" Always read Sarah Lyall, but especially always read her entries in the New York Times’ all-around excellent World Cup reporting.

–Naomi Novik’s Scholomance novels, about a cranky teenage sorceress named Galadriel and her “deadly education” at the darkest-timeline version of Hogwarts, are extremely well-plotted and emotionally satisfying; I burned through all three in November. Novik is particularly great at writing flawed characters who begrudgingly become better people, which is exactly the type of entertainment I want these days. (Meanwhile, I’ve so far skipped both House of the Dragon and White Lotus and am perfectly content with those decisions!)

–I agree with much of the praise, shallow and serious, for The Bear. It’s also satisfying in a way that I find good Broadway plays satisfying – it’s basically four hours or so of angry, grieving, flawed (but trying! see above) people arguing in a closed space, with excellent acting and occasional laugh-out-loud humor to punctuate all the tension and profanity.

–Lessons in Chemistry definitely doesn’t deserve its book cover, which made me think it was going to be something in between Beach Reach and Where’d You Go, Bernadette. I’m also not sure I found it quite as weighty as this corrective New York Times article made it out to be: While I appreciated how matter-of-fact author Bonnie Garmus was about bereavement and sexual assault and the rampant sexism afflicting female scientists in the 1950s, her resolutions to some of those problems felt a little easy. But as a fairy tale with an earned happy ending for its heroine? (See above!) I really enjoyed it. 

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