Why Tech’s Richest Founders Keep Their Billion-Dollar Foundations Offline

The Musk Foundation, Elon Musk’s private charitable foundation, had its biggest year yet in 2024, giving away roughly $474 million. Online, however, there was little sign of it. Its bare-bones website lists only five priorities—renewable energy, space exploration, pediatric research, science education and safe A.I. —and offers no staff biographies, application instructions or contact information.

Foundations tied to LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang similarly manage billions of dollars while saying remarkably little about how they operate. Their tax returns reveal where their checks landed, but they rarely explain how recipients got in the door or what the donors hope to achieve. That quiet approach stands in contrast to philanthropies like the Gates Foundation and Bezos Earth Fund, which keep prominent public profiles and publish extensive information about their strategies and grantmaking.

That silence can look secretive. In philanthropy, though, it is not unusual.

“Many philanthropists choose a lower profile to protect their privacy and personal security, manage the volume of unsolicited funding requests or keep the focus on the nonprofit and its mission rather than on the donor,” Gillian Howell, national philanthropy executive at Foundation Source, told Observer.

While visibility can help donors draw attention to causes and inspire others to give, “it’s common for donors to have concerns, and in some cases, less visibility can support greater impact and effectiveness,” Howell said.

Rather than operating like traditional mega-charities with public review boards, these billionaire founders often skip public-facing portals and open applications entirely. Instead, they write multimillion-dollar checks through advisers, personal networks and private tips, often avoiding the flood of pitches that can come with a high-profile presence. 

Musk builds this discretion into his giving philosophy. In 2019, a spokesperson for Musk Foundation told The Guardian that Musk believed true philanthropy was done, for the most part, anonymously. Six years later, Musk returned to the topic on Nikhil Kamath’s “People by WTF” podcast, saying his foundation’s greatest challenge was giving money in a way that was “truly beneficial to people.”

“It’s very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness,” Musk said. Achieving the “reality of goodness,” he added, is far more difficult.

Yet, like any tax-exempt private foundation, his organization is legally required to file annual IRS disclosures, offering the public a rare paper trail into where those hundreds of millions actually go.

According to its latest return, the Musk Foundation’s record $474 million payout in 2024 was highly concentrated. About $370 million went to The Foundation, a separate Musk-backed nonprofit behind the new Ad Astra school in Bastrop, Texas, alongside broader plans for primary and secondary education and, ultimately, a university. Its latest return reported less than $1 million in annual expenses and nearly $780 million in net assets, indicating that most of the funding remained with the nonprofit rather than being spent on the current school.

Another $35 million went to Fidelity Charitable, a sponsor of donor-advised funds that makes eventual recipients more difficult to trace. The remainder was divided among dozens of organizations working in healthcare, science, education, affordable housing and disaster relief, from Austin Habitat for Humanity to Code.org and Team Rubicon. Musk was the sole contributor that year, donating Tesla stock then valued at $73.9 million. The foundation’s much larger payout, therefore, drew on assets accumulated in earlier years. While the filing shows his financial interests, it leaves out how recipients were chosen or what Musk expects from them.

Why billionaires prefer to give behind closed doors

Fear of public scrutiny often discourages donors from being transparent — or even moving more capital, Nicholas Tedesco, president and CEO of the National Center for Family Philanthropy, told Observer. A grant that attracts negative coverage “may loom large in the mind of a donor — much more so than the many successful grants that get less public attention,” he said.

There are practical bottlenecks, too. A public presence often invites inquiries from nonprofits, said Katherina “Kat” M. Rosqueta, founding executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy. A lean foundation may simply lack the staff to vet and respond thoughtfully to every email.

Staying quiet can spare the nonprofits themselves. “The market for nonprofit funding is incredibly inefficient,” Rosqueta said. “Nonprofits spend a lot of time and energy chasing dollars. No foundation can fund every organization seeking money.” Staying closed can prevent charities from investing scarce hours into applications that will never be read.

Hoffman has been unusually candid about how his closed-door system works. In 2024, his Aphorism Foundation held about $1.1 billion in assets and made over 25 grants totaling roughly $43.4 million. Its tax return lists just two unpaid officers, including himself as president, treasurer and director, and Frank F. Huang, the foundation’s secretary. Aphorism has no public website and accepts no unsolicited proposals.

“It’s never by application. That’s not the way we operate,” Hoffman told Inside Philanthropy in 2024. Instead, he relies on referrals from his network to find people pursuing ambitious, high-risk ideas, treating charity much like a venture capitalist finding founders through introductions.

Aphorism’s two largest awards in 2024—about $10 million each—went to Earth Species Project, which uses A.I. to decode animal communication, and the Probabilistic Computing Foundation, which backs open-source computing research.

“Generally speaking, we don’t seek publicity in any of this stuff,” Hoffman said in the same interview. Asked why Aphorism lacked even a LinkedIn page, he noted that one wouldn’t improve the network referrals reaching his foundation.

Where Hoffman’s giving resembles venture capital, Sergey Brin’s philanthropy is more personal.
Brin’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and Brin carries a mutation in the LRRK2 gene associated with an elevated risk of developing it.

In 2024, the Sergey Brin Family Foundation held about $4.3 billion in assets and reported $722 million in charitable disbursements. More than $250 million went to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, while other major grants supported climate, public health and basic science.

Despite that scale, the foundation has no public website and says it supports only preselected organizations. Inside Philanthropy has reported that Brin’s family office, Bayshore Global Management, appears to handle his charitable giving. The foundation’s tax filings also show that outside firms provide administrative and consulting support.

Different vehicles, different visibility

Not every family relies on a single charitable structure. “They may use a donor-advised fund for individual giving, which offers less visibility, but then use a foundation for collective giving, which is inherently more transparent given 990s are publicly available,” Tedesco said. 

Jensen and Lori Huang, for example, saw their foundation’s assets rise from $3.4 billion in 2023 to $9.2 billion in 2024 as Nvidia’s stock surged. (Nvidia’s stock price has risen another 54 percent since then.) It distributed $126 million that year while listing the Huangs as unpaid officers.

Yet roughly two-thirds of that payout was routed through quieter channels: $82.5 million went to the Schwab Charitable Fund (now DAFgiving360), a sponsor of donor-advised funds. These allow donors to claim immediate tax deductions while keeping individual grant recommendations off public records.

The Huangs are not averse to public giving. The couple, who met as undergraduate engineering lab partners at Oregon State University, announced a $50 million gift to the school in 2022 to fund an A.I. and robotics research center housing an Nvidia-powered supercomputer.

Traditional transparency can serve its own purpose. When used thoughtfully, visibility helps donors “promote the causes they care about, establish credibility, attract like-minded partners, build a legacy and lead by example,” Foundation Source’s Howell noted.

The Gates Foundation, for instance, reported $8.01 billion in total expenses in 2024, including nearly $6.9 billion in grants and direct charitable contracts. It maintains a fully searchable public database, publishes detailed program strategies and posts audited financial statements online. Similarly, the Bezos Earth Fund—established through Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate pledge—says it has awarded $2.4 billion to date and publicly details its programs, priorities and grant recipients.