Forbes

Based on recent analysis, Forbes has identified what looks like a pretty elite club: 19 people who have already donated at least $1 billion each to charities or foundations. That is five more than Forbes found two years ago. More than two-thirds of these philanthropists (13 to be exact) are from the U.S. and all but one is a self-made entrepreneur.

Topping the list is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the most generous person on the planet in dollar terms, having gifted $28 billion to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Someone has hijacked the tax identity of more than 2,300 tiny or defunct nonprofits, apparently taking advantage of a hole in a new electronic Internal Revenue Service filing system to list the same person as a charitable official at the same mail box drop in Las Vegas.

The charities, most of which seem to be religious in nature, all identify a “principal officer” as one William Alexander of Non Profit Accounting Services, with a stated location at a mail-box office address on N. Rainbow Blvd. in Las Vegas.

Bill Gates, the college dropout who started the world's richest charitable fund, said needy people depend on self-made millionaires and billionaires to donate money before passing their wealth on to less-generous heirs.

"Our experience worldwide is that first-generation wealth is actually more generous than dynastic wealth," Gates, the richest American, said Thursday in a news conference in New Delhi. "Both here in India and U.S. and other countries, the biggest givers are those who are receivers of first-generation wealth."

Billionaire David H. Koch opened the new David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he gave $100 million to help build. And in a brief, and rare, interview, Mr. Koch, 70, spoke of his hopes for the new center, his prostate cancer and the prank call heard around the world.

This week's industry news includes a major honor for a software provider, new appointments at a payment-processing company, and a new global workforce development initiative.

A social-media campaign by the retailer Target was one of two charitable efforts that won a spot on a new list of top 20 social-media campaigns compiled by Forbes magazine. Over two weeks, visitors to Target’s Facebook page were allowed to vote on which of 10 charities would receive the biggest portion of $3-million Target had decided to give.

This new research shows that charitable organizations are still outpacing the business world and academia in their use of social media. The latest study (2009) revealed that a remarkable ninety-seven percent of charitable organizations are using some form of social media including blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking, video blogging, wikis and Twitter.

Billionaire Paul Allen has taken his friend Bill Gates up on his challenge to publicly pledge the majority of his wealth to philanthropy.

Allen, who is 57, said today that he plans to leave the majority of his $13 billion estate to philanthropy to continue the work of his foundation and to fund scientific research. It was also a way of marking the 20th anniversary of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which he started in 1990 with his sister, Jo Lynn Allen, and has since given 3,000 grants totaling about $400 million.

March 15, 2010, Chronicle of Philanthropy — The richest man in the world is no longer American, but Mexican, a sign of the developing world's wealth — and potentially foreshadowing a shift in philanthropy.

Jan. 25, 2009, Forbes — When the Chronicle of Philanthropy released its annual report on nonprofit salaries in October 2009, several journalists responded critically by accusing well-compensated nonprofit chief executive officers of being driven by financial gain rather than belief in the cause and by suggesting that these "bloated salaries" represent irresponsible spending by the entire nonprofit sector. (See "Nonprofit Millionaires.") While this is certainly not the first time a public debate has been waged over nonprofit salaries, this time around the especially harsh allegations of bloated CEO salaries in the nonprofit world seem fueled, in part, by public outrage over of the pay packages earned by corporate executives. This misplaced anger amounts to kicking nonprofits while they're down.