The blockbuster initial public offerings from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are poised to mint a new class of millionaires and billionaires, and nonprofit groups are mobilizing to capture what they expect will be a historic wave of charitable giving, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A foundation holding a 26% equity stake in OpenAI is expected to hold shares valued at around $180 billion — more than twice the size of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s endowment — and has pledged to give away at least $1 billion over the next year to causes including curing diseases and life sciences, the newspaper reported. The foundation’s giving alone would represent a major commitment, but the combined wealth created by the three companies’ public listings is expected to be far larger.
Adam Nash, co-founder and chief executive of Daffy, a donor-advised fund used by employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, told the Journal he expects “not just billions, but potentially tens of billions” to flow into the charitable sector after the IPOs.
Anthropic’s seven founders have each pledged to donate at least 80% of their wealth, a collective commitment that Forbes, using the company’s February valuation of $380 billion, estimated at $39.2 billion. The company’s valuation has since surged to $965 billion. In a widely circulated essay in January, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei compared the moment to the Gilded Age, writing that industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie “felt an obligation to give back” and that “those who are at the forefront of AI’s economic boom should be willing to give away both their wealth and their power.”
Anthropic has a history of encouraging employee giving. For several years it offered to quadruple any employee’s charitable contribution of equity, Amodei said. The company currently offers a 1:1 match for up to a quarter of an employee’s total equity grant.
The last comparable wave of tech philanthropy followed Facebook’s 2012 IPO. In that year and the next, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave 18 million shares of Facebook to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, or SVCF, which pools charitable gifts and distributes them to nonprofits. Nicole Taylor, SVCF’s president and chief executive, told the Journal that each wave of Silicon Valley wealth — from the Hewletts and Packards through social media to the current AI boom — has shared a common premise: “They want to create change, and they want to do it at scale.”
Experts cited by the Journal said millennial donors from the AI sector are likely to focus on systemic issues such as climate change, education and wealth inequality, rather than the traditional recipients of earlier generations — alma maters, houses of worship and local nonprofits. That could lead to a constellation of mission-driven strategies, including philanthropic giving, political spending and new company launches, mirroring the way early PayPal employees went on to found SpaceX, LinkedIn and YouTube after eBay’s 2002 acquisition of the payments company.
Much of the giving is expected to flow through donor-advised funds, which allow donors to contribute cash or stock in a lump sum, receive an immediate tax deduction, and then disburse the money to charities later. Daffy’s Nash described donating shares as a “triple win” for taxes: donors can avoid capital-gains taxes on appreciation, deduct the fair market value on their taxes (up to 30% of adjusted gross income), and let the money grow tax-free inside the fund. However, experts cautioned that the funds have no annual distribution requirements, meaning money can pile up without a giving plan.
San Francisco-area donors are already more generous than the national average. In 2024, the average grant to charities from Fidelity Charitable donor-advised funds held by San Francisco residents was $16,830, more than three times the national average, and 40% went to local charities.
Some have questioned whether the nonprofit sector can absorb the projected influx. Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate, called in a widely read post for the sector to “dramatically expand” capacity to field an estimated increase of $50 billion a year. Erinn Andrews, founder of Bay Area philanthropic planning firm GiveTeam, countered the concern, telling the Journal: “What terrible thing would happen if they got too much money? It is not bad for organizations to have more.”
The timing of giving may be shaped by the nature of the technology itself, said Lyell Sakaue, a partner in the San Francisco office of Bridgespan, a nonprofit consulting firm that has worked with about 50 donors to move roughly $15 billion to philanthropy over the past five years. Sakaue said some AI executives believe that when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, money won’t matter, “so now is the time” to give. Others, he said, think ownership of the asset will be the only thing that matters in the future, leading them to hold on to more.