Reid Hoffman has said he wants to spend his multibillion-dollar fortune during his lifetime. Yet for all the attention the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist has received as a Democratic megadonor, particularly during this election season, his philanthropy tends to get only piecemeal coverage.
He is known as a high-profile supporter of his fellow megadonors’ favorite philanthropic competition hub Lever for Change, whose name he helped choose, and garners headlines for large gifts to outfits like the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and the Obama Foundation. But few comprehensive portraits of his philanthropy exist.
That’s partly by design. Hoffman helped create LinkedIn, but his $1 billion Aphorism Foundation does not even have a profile on the platform, nor a website. Like some of his fellow tech philanthropists, publicity is not a goal for Hoffman. Aphorism’s former homepage contained only a notice that the foundation did not accept unsolicited grant requests and a tongue-in-cheek tagline: “There must be a pithy saying about this.”
Nor is Aphorism Hoffman’s main giving vehicle. Most of his philanthropic dollars flow through a donor-advised fund, which have no disclosure requirements at the individual account level, and thus are impossible to follow. Such a hybrid set up is common among billionaires and it illustrates the challenge of evaluating the modern megadonor. Some of the philanthropy is public, but an unquantifiable amount is not. (And in his case we know enough to say it is a much larger share.)
What is clear is Hoffman has opinions on the sector. He once contacted a reporter for The Atlantic after she published a review — titled “The Problem with Modern Philanthropy” — of IP founder and Editor David Callahan’s book, “The Givers.” The tech entrepreneur ended up doing a Q&A defending billionaire philanthropy. He has also used his LinkedIn account to expound on the sector, whether on why he backs food banks or to laud the philanthropy of the man whose company bought his: “In Times of Pandemic, In Gates We Trust.”
He also recently sat for a 30-minute Q&A with me, in which we talked about the “Reid Hoffman school of giving” and how he chooses grantees. That conversation will give you a sense for the way Hoffman thinks and talks about his philanthropy: to my ear, most like a venture capitalist or, at times, an effective altruist. Below, I’ve focused on what his actual funding can tell us and what we don’t know.
So far, the 57-year-old and Giving Pledge signatory is still earning money faster than he’s giving it away, by his own admission. Hoffman’s fortune has risen steadily since 2019, and is currently estimated at $2.5 billion. On the other hand, his wealth has only inched upward during a time when billionaire wealth has surged 88%, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. It’s an imperfect measure, but it suggests Hoffman is sending much of his gains out the door — including as political donations — unlike many of his fellow billionaires.
That’s despite essentially flying solo — and keeping a very busy schedule. Hoffman has “zero” grantmaking staff and is directly involved in all funding, according to his chief of staff, Aria Finger. Michelle Yee, Hoffman’s wife, was co-president of the foundation when it was launched in 2013, but dropped off the board a few years later.
“She just prefers to have a less public role,” said Hoffman, who is now the foundation’s lone director. “We still collaborate on a lot of deep things. The only change is a less public role.”
Who’s getting checks from Aphorism?
True to his venture capitalist background, Hoffman says he looks for leaders he believes in and backs them heavily — and that’s what the data show. Aphorism’s most common grant amount is $1 million, according to Candid.
Topping the list is Barack Obama: The former president’s foundation has received nearly $17 million from Aphorism over the years. Another is Sam Altman’s OpenAI, which received $10 million between 2017 and 2018. His thoughts on OpenAI converting into a for-profit company? “I’ve talked to those folks a lot. Its mission is still the same,” he said.
Hoffman has long been a major funder of AI, which first caught his attention as a Stanford undergrad. Examples include grants to University of Toronto’s iSchool, programs at Harvard and MIT, and pitching in to start a pooled fund in 2017 on AI ethics and governance.
Aphorism’s top grantees have also included lesser-known figures, like Byron Auguste, the CEO of Opportunity at Work, whose awards over the years total $15 million.
He also bet big on Nancy Lublin, the former CEO of Crisis Text Line, which received $15 million in funding from Aphorism between 2016 and 2018. “She builds nonprofits the way Donald Trump builds skyscrapers,” Hoffman once said. Lublin was ousted in 2020 after a staff rebellion over what The Verge called a “pattern of racial insensitivity” by leadership.
Another major grantee is a project of fellow billionaires: the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which has received Aphorism awards totalling $14 million over the years. The project has a moonshot goal: It aspires to cure, prevent or manage all diseases by the end of this century, with a short-term approach of patient, flexible support for top scientists. “I helped recruit Joe DeRisi, the president,” Hoffman said.
Universities are another favored recipient. In the last five years, Aphorism has awarded more than $13 million to centers of higher learning in Toronto, Wisconsin, Sussex and Santa Cruz. The top recipients have been in one of America’s centers of elite education, Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. They include MIT, Harvard, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching institution of Harvard Medical School.
Most of Aphorism’s grant dollars have gone to recipients in just three states: California, Massachusetts and New York, with about 10 grantees in each state receiving funding, according to Candid. Only one other state, New Jersey, has more than one Aphorism grantee.
What about Hoffman’s donor-advised fund?
The picture when it comes to Hoffman’s larger funding vehicle, his DAF, is fuzzier. His staff would not share a list of those grantees, saying not all want to be public, nor would they share the total dollar amount given through the DAF.
His chief of staff instead provided a list of organizations to which Hoffman has given “seven-figure-plus” awards through the DAF in the past two years, grouped into five areas: science, AI, economic opportunity, human rights and democracy.
Science grantees include the nonprofit outer space R&D lab Aurelia, the multi-philanthropy-backed incubator Science for America, nonprofit tech infrastructure organization Knowledge Futures Group, and Aphorism grantee Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.
Under the “AI for humanity” category, named grantees were the nonprofit tech accelerator Fast Forward, a now-defunct technology philosophy outfit called Transformation of the Human, and foundation grantee OpenAI.
Such funding also includes a nonprofit, Earth Species Project, or ESP, that is using AI to try to decipher how species like elephants, whales and birds communicate. It recently announced a $10 million grant from Hoffman. “I believe this research will transform not just science, but culture, helping humanity reconnect with nature in ways that are urgently needed as we face global challenges like climate change,” Hoffman said in the press release.
Hoffman’s “economic opportunity/entrepreneurship” portfolio includes the microfinance platform Kiva, the entrepreneur community Endeavor, the B corporation certifier BLab, the training nonprofit Leaders in Tech and another foundation grantee, Opportunity@Work.
He also has several recipients under a “human rights” category, such as the corporate board diversity outfit HimforHer, the venture capital equity organization AllRaise, the mass incarceration tech nonprofit Ameelio, Bryan Stevenson’s well-known legal group Equal Justice Initiative and the food bank Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
Finally, democracy is a key area, with grantees like the liberal think tank New America, the nonpartisan voter assistance group VoteAmerica and civic technology nonprofit Cortico. Finger noted most of Hoffman’s democracy giving does not go to 501(c)(3)s.
(Hoffman helped fund, for instance, the suit by journalist and author E. Jean Carroll that found Donald Trump guilty of defamation and sexual assault and liable for $5 million.)
Taken together, the list indicates Hoffman has sent at least 21 grantees seven-figure checks through his DAF. But given that some of those awards, like ESP’s $10 million grant, may swell into eight-figure territory, it’s hard to say where his biggest bets lie.
Nor is this a complete list. For instance, there’s Lever for Change, which Forbes reported Hoffman has given $5 million and pledged another $11 million. He’s also listed as giving more than $25 million to the Obama Foundation, well in excess of Aphorism’s contributions.
Roughly summing the recent gifts suggests Hoffman has awarded at least $35 million through his DAF over the last couple years, and likely much more. Aphorism, by contrast, granted only $17 million between 2021 and 2022, the most recent years for which data is available. Hoffman’s DAF is clearly where the action is.
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A varied picture, but an incomplete one
In 2016, Hoffman sold LinkedIn to Microsoft for $26 billion in cash, netting him an reported $2.8 billion and supercharging his foundation. That year, Hoffman dropped nearly $803 million into Aphorism. The foundation’s grantmaking jumped to nearly $70 million the next year, and in 2018 it shipped another $55 million.
Yet Hoffman’s foundation has never hit such highs again, or even come close. Since 2019, the foundation has used credits from those two years’ massive distributions to meet its minimum required payout level of 5%, based on its IRS filings through 2022. In other words, for four straight years it gave as little as legally possible.
For some donors, this would raise a question of their philanthropic commitment. Those years, after all, were a time of enormous need for nonprofits and humanity, featuring a pandemic and massive economic downturn. For Hoffman, it’s clear that there’s a lot of other giving going on, both philanthropic and political. As laid out above, he’s given tens of millions of dollars via his DAF. And he’s been one of the most visible Democratic megadonors, donating at least $34.8 million this cycle, putting him and Yee among the nation’s top 30 donors, according to the Washington Post. He’s also put at least $1.5 billion into impact investments through his charitable entities.
Asked about the low level of giving through his foundation, he said it was a “quirk of structures” — i.e., DAF versus foundation — and a matter of opportunities. “I don’t have a budget per year, either generally or anything else. It’s just as you find projects, you do those projects,” he said. During the pandemic, “we upped to a lot of essential services …. things like food banks.”
“One of the things, maybe this is — at the moment, I’m a part-time philanthropist,” he concluded. “I also have other jobs… I don’t have a little dashboard of what I’m doing, other than, you know, being active.”
Hoffman does have a lot more going on than just his day job. He has podcasts, hosts a tech conference, is teaching a course at Wharton and keeps an election-season media schedule that has him speaking on venues like CNBC and Bloomberg. He clearly wants to share his opinions — and he shares more than some billionaire philanthropists about what he’s funding. But that does not include revealing all the organizations he’s backing — or how much he’s betting on them.
That makes it difficult to fully assess his, or many other megadonors’ philanthropy — let alone take it into account alongside political donations, current events, tax policy, public claims or total wealth. We can see what Hoffman and others show us, but we cannot know its full extent or scale.
Does Hoffman’s philanthropy measure up to his own standards?
I’ve now reviewed Hoffman’s foundation’s 990s and a partial list of his DAF giving, read his writings and interviews on philanthropy, and spoken for half an hour with the man. His record as a donor is admirable. Yet I find myself still struggling to reconcile his words and his actions on philanthropy, even after the opportunity to ask him about those contradictions.
In his Giving Pledge letter, he and Yee call philanthropy “a form of community engagement” and a “partnership” — and that the “most important” community members are those “directly affected by that engagement.” But other than his ample funding for Lever for Change, and maybe a couple smaller grantees, it’s unclear to me how he has partnered with those “most important” community members. (Plus, he seems to give at least as much to a billionaire-run effort, i.e., the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub.) As with most any philanthropist, it seems the partnership begins and ends with them receiving his money. Valuable for them, but hardly living up to the rhetoric.
Hoffman has said he nearly became an academic, partly because he believes so strongly in “public intellectual culture.” Even Elon Musk, who worked with Hoffman at PayPal, noticed his passion: “He believes… in stimulating public discourse.” Yet it’s unclear how that applies to a debate about his philanthropy and who he chooses to fund, because none of us can see the whole picture. And though he often sounds like an effective altruist, Hoffman does not quite meet that movement’s exemplary standard of transparency and public reasoning.
Hoffman, in case it is not clear, deserves strong praise for being one of the most active philanthropists of his class. Precious few billionaires give away such a great share of their wealth that the corpus grows only modestly (let alone decreases). Hoffman does, while still only being a part-time philanthropist. But to my mind — and as IP has attempted to do with other stand-out megadonors — that’s all the more reason to examine whether how he’s doing philanthropy matches how he talks about it.
