Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg led the way on the giving list for U.S. philanthropists, gifting a Silicon Valley foundation with nearly $1 billion along with his wife, Priscilla Chan.
Zuckerberg, 29, who founded the social media website while a student at Harvard, offered the Silicon Valley Community Foundation 18 million in Facebook shares, totaling about $992 million.
The youthful social media pioneer joins 14 other big ticket donors in the U.S., including outgoing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and businessman and political activist David Koch, who were among those giving away at least $100 million of their fortunes at one time,
according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which released its annual charitable giving list Wednesday.
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Zuckerberg is the first person aged under 30 to top the list of biggest givers.
The year's top 15 donors gave a total of $3.4 billion, the Chronicle noted, calling 2013 "notable because of a strong rebound in the number of gifts of $100-million or more." The total amount of gifts of $100 million or more reached $9.6 billion —a jump of more than one-third over the 2012 figure.
Universities were the big gainers with 12 of the 15 biggest gifts going to higher-education institutes. The University of Michigan received two of those.
Zuckerberg made the same donation last year, 18 million shares of Facebook stock, but in 2012, those shares were valued at much less, worth under $500 million,
Forbes reported. With stocks making significant gains in 2013, Facebook shares rebounded as well, nearly doubling Zuckerberg's net worth from $12.5 billion last year to $25 billion this year.
Nike chairman Phil Knight came in second on the 2013 list, giving $500 million to the Oregon Health & Science University Foundation for cancer research. Outgoing New York mayor Bloomberg was third pledging $350 million to Johns Hopkins University and financier Charles Johnson was fourth for his offered $250 million pledge to Yale.
The others on the list are: Real estate developer Stephen Ross, $200 million pledge to the University of Michigan; real-estate heiress Muriel Block, $160 million bequest to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Yeshiva University; real-estate develoeper John Arrillaga, $151 million pledge to Stanford University; Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, $133 million pledge to Cornell NYC Tech; Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charles Munger, $110 million pledge to University of Michigan; David Koch, $100 million pledge to New York-Presbyterian Hospital; real-estate developer Frank McCourt, $100 million pledge to Georgetown University; investor Ronald Perelman, $100 million pledge to Columbia Business School; United National Corporation chairman T. Denny Sanford, $100 million pledge to the University of California at San Diego; financier Stephen Schwarzman, $100 million pledge to Tsinghua University; and real-estate heiress Deborah Joy Simon, $100 million pledge to Mercersburg Academy.
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