EBay’s Affluent Flood Charities, Civic Groups
The Internet site once dismissed as an online flea market has produced three of America’s most generous philanthropists.
The trio from EBay Inc.-- co-founders Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll and Chief Executive Meg Whitman -- represents the largest contingent from any company on the 2002 America’s Biggest Donors list, which appears in the current issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Their combined donations totaled just over $99 million.
EBay’s showing on the list surpasses that of firms with much longer histories and much bigger market values.
All told, eight of the 60 philanthropists on the list hail from the beleaguered technology sector. Together, they gave $262.75 million.
“It’s very surprising, given what is going on with tech companies in the philanthropy world,” said Stacy Palmer, editor of the biweekly journal that published the list in cooperation with Microsoft Corp.’s online Slate magazine. “A lot of people who got rich off of technology were just starting to talk about being major donors when the bubble burst, and then they couldn’t follow through.”
To make the cut for the list, a philanthropist had to give or pledge at least $10 million during 2002.
Omidyar, who started EBay in a spare bedroom of his San Jose apartment in 1995, and his wife, Pamela Kerr Omidyar, ranked 19th for donating $48.25 million to community groups and to the HopeLab Foundation they founded to develop products for children with chronic illnesses.
“One of the main projects we’re working on is a state-of-the-art video game,” Pamela Omidyar said last year. She described it as “a means for adolescents with cancer to learn and improve their quality of life through game play.”
Whitman took 27th place for pledging $30 million to her alma mater, Princeton University.
And Skoll, who wrote EBay’s first business plan, has the 35th spot for giving $20.8 million to his foundation, which funds educational programs and organizations that provide services to budding entrepreneurs.
Omidyar, 35, and Skoll, 38, are the only listees under the age of 40. Neither they nor Whitman could be reached for comment.
At the top of the list was late publishing magnate Walter Annenberg, who left gifts worth nearly $1.4 billion. About $1 billion of that was the estimated worth of his art collection, which he bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The biggest tech donor was Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who ranked 14th for spreading $73.7 million among the University of Washington in Seattle, his own foundation and other groups. In the 24th spot was Oracle Corp. founder and Chief Executive Larry Ellison, who gave $35 million to his medical research foundation.
Major gifts were way down in 2002, according to the Chronicle. The total amount donated by members of the current list is $4.6 billion, compared with $12.7 billion in 2001.
Only two of the donors are from Hollywood; DreamWorks SKG moguls Steven Spielberg and David Geffen gave a combined $217 million. Nearly all of that was in the form of a single gift to what now is the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
The list does not include anonymous gifts, which might have put more Hollywood types on the roster, Palmer said.
“There are celebrities who keep their giving private because they don’t want a lot of people coming after them for money,” she said.
