House Energy and Commerce Committee via AP
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing at the U.S. Capitol, March 25, 2021.
Jack Dorsey has flogged off some $428 million in personal wealth over the past two years, and philanthropy professionals aren’t pleased about it.
The ex-Twitter CEO is giving away his money largely unaided, with help from just a couple of employees. Critics say he has not hired enough program officers—experts in how to give away money—to dole out the cash.
This sort of giving is just not done without professional assistance, Greg Witkowski, a senior lecturer of nonprofit management at Columbia University, explained to the Prospect.
“If you’re in the business of coping with social problems, to argue that you can do it without any kind of institutional organization doesn’t make much sense,” Witkowski said.
A story from last week at Bloomberg also questions Dorsey’s “erratic” grantmaking.
“This is not how the world of big money philanthropy typically operates,” the article explains. “Forgoing the large teams of consultants and experts favored by his philanthropic peers, he has just two employees from his family office in charge of helping him empty his wallet.”
In April of last year, Dorsey tweeted, “Giving $2mm to @DirectRelief.” “Wow. Thank you!” the charity wrote back. “I honestly don’t know what the decision-making was on his part,” the CEO of Direct Relief later said.
The exchange serves as the lead anecdote of the Bloomberg article, where it is meant to illustrate an arbitrary style out of place in the methodical and efficient world of charitable giving. Without experts to design a successful donation strategy, the story finds, Dorsey has instead given lavishly to his personal friends.
Dorsey does appear to be picking favorites: Gifts have flowed to charities backed by stars like Rihanna and Jay-Z. Driven by gifts from Dorsey, for example, Rihanna’s foundation, which aims to make the Caribbean more climate-resilient, more than doubled its donations from 2019 to 2020.
Some of Dorsey’s gifts suggest a personal dislike of petty functionaries, whether in the public or nonprofit sector.
But nepotism is the rule, not the exception, in donor circles. Perhaps the most iconic tie-up in modern philanthropy comes from Warren Buffett, the affable insurance and railroad magnate, who has donated more than $30 billion to his close friends at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Michael Bloomberg has also made major donations to Gates.
Detractors are more likely registering their displeasure at Dorsey for changing the style, not the substance, of elite aid. He has laid bare the chumminess of upper-class philanthropy, even as the peerage go out of their way to professionalize it.
None of this suits the growing class of nest-feathering philanthropy professionals, who may regret that their nonprofit management degrees are going to waste. By comparison with Dorsey’s lean operation, the Bloomberg article notes that the foundation of Jim Simons, the billionaire manager of Renaissance Technologies, employs some 400 people. That outstrips the hedge fund itself, which according to its website has a staff of 300.
Given the amount of money Dorsey is looking to give away, Witkowski estimated that he should hire tens or hundreds of staffers.
The criticism of Dorsey’s low-overhead approach comes as tech executives have become high-profile patrons of social services, especially during the pandemic. Microsoft founder Bill Gates built vaccine factories. Through his philanthropic investment company, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put together a COVID-19 testing lab for the California Department of Public Health. Crypto entrepreneurs bankrolled a push to fund future pandemic preparedness in President Biden’s social-spending bill.
The tech wallahs’ growing influence on public health has swelled without much scrutiny and even with cloying praise. Relying on the tender mercies of billionaires for health infrastructure raises fewer eyebrows than whether they are hiring enough staff to fill out grant applications.
Some of Dorsey’s gifts suggest a personal dislike of petty functionaries, whether in the public or nonprofit sector. His tastes are varied, but he has given some of his biggest one-off grants to groups focused on no-strings-attached aid. For example, he gave $15 million to Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, who are piloting cash payment programs in cities like Newark, Saint Paul, and Tacoma.
Whatever you think of basic-income schemes (they come in left-wing, right-wing, and tech-dystopian flavors), their proponents argue that they bypass a bureaucracy that makes it expensive and time-consuming to access social services. Dorsey appears to like the idea of just giving people money so much that he extended the principle to his own philanthropy.
All told, it’s hard not to feel a little sympathy for Jack. The bohemian billionaire committed the blunder of giving to his friends without first hiring an intermediary stratum of money managers. Maybe the old-boy network that has long traded tax-deductible gifts over cocktails finds it crass. Tant mieux.
