George Soros has quietly given away most of his multi-billion fortune.
For the past two years, the 87-year-old hedge fund manager has donated $18billion to Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropy network he founded in 1993.
Foundation officials told the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that Soros started moving most of his money in 2015, when his wealth was calculated at $24.2billion.
OSF now appears to have the largest endowment in the U.S., behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
George Soros has secretly given away most of his fortune to his private charity, Open Society Foundations
It’s clear that Soros isn’t looking for a thank you, because the large-scale donations have not been publicized until now.
Even Forbes, which tracks the wealth of the world’s richest people, hasn’t caught the donations while compiling their annual billionaires list. As of Tuesday, their website still listed Soros as the 38th richest man in the world with a net worth of $23billion. Soros is now likely much lower on the list, with a personal wealth of just a few billion.
And he’ll only continue to drop on that list. According to the Journal, Soros has plans to donate most of the rest of his wealth in his lifetime or upon his death.
OSF is a private philanthropy that operates more than 40 foundations and offices around the world, with a goal of building ‘vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to their citizens’.
But others think that the foundation meddles in the affairs of sovereign nations.
Pro-Israel groups are especially angered with the foundation, for funding two activists groups, Adalah and I’lam, which are politically anti-Israel.
Soros has also been linked to the boats ferrying Middle Eastern migrants into Europe.
Soros started Open Society Foundations after surviving Nazi and Communist regimes in his birth country of Hungary. After he escaped Hungary in 1947, and went on to make his billions, Soros decided to give by back helping foster democracies.
In fact, one of the first programs he funded in 1984 was an initiative to distribute photocopiers to universities and libraries in his home country, to break the government’s hold on information.
Politically progressive, Soros’ charity causes in his adopted country of America have also made him the target of criticism.
He has been vilified by the right for working with Planned Parenthood and funding causes associated with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Soros has also been a major Democratic party donor, and gave Hillary Clinton $8billion during the 2016 election. When Donald Trump won, OSF pledged to spend $10million fighting hate crimes, which started to spike during Trump’s campaign.