According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of top donations, the world’s richest person gave the immense charitable contribution in 2020, which is a $10 billion gift to help fight climate change.

According to the Chronicle, Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, whose real-time worth Forbes magazine evaluates at $188 billion, used the contribution to launch his Bezos Earth Fund that supports non-profits involved in the climate crisis; it has paid $790 million to 16 groups until now.  

Although the Bezos’ big gift, the total of the top 10 donations during the last year, $2.6 billion, was the lowest since 2011, even the increase of many billionaires fortune in the stock market that dropped technology shares especially previous year.

Moreover, from March 18 through December 7, 2020, Bezos’ fortune rose by 63 percent, from $113 billion to $184 billion, according to the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies.

Always, according to the Chronicle, Phil Knight, who with his wife, Penny, made the second and third-biggest donations last year, augmented his fortune by almost 77 percent during the same March-to-December period. Knight and his wife made donation with $900 million to the Knight Foundation and $300 million to the University of Oregon.

On his part, Fred Kummer, the founder of construction company HBE Corporation, and his wife, June, made donation with $300 to create a foundation to support programs at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

While, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, gave the fourth-largest donation on the Chronicle’s list with a value of $250 million gift to the Center for Tech and Civic Life that worked on voting security issues in the 2020 election. According to Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, Zuckerberg fortune nearly doubled to $105 billion in the March-to-December period, and he has been largely criticized and been called to testify before Congress for his company’s handling of disinformation in the runup to the 2020 presidential election.

Furthermore, Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, was in the fifth position giving $200 million via his foundation to Children’s healthcare of Atlanta to construct a new hospital.

It should indicate that Bezos and the Zuckerbergs were in the next positions on last year’s top 10 list, with $100 million donations, Bezos for Feeding America to support food banks across the country and the Zuckerbergs to the same election security group.

And then Stephen Ross, founder of real estate firm Related Companies; David Roux, co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, a private-equity firm, and his wife, Barbara; George and Renee Karfunkel, real-estate investors; Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot; and Charles Schwab, founder of Schwab Financial Services, and his wife, Helen.

However, two billionaires who donated greatly to charity last year, MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’ former wife, and Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter did not make the Chronicle’s list because no single donation of theirs was large enough to qualify. But, in February, the Chronicle would publish its list of the 50 biggest donors that counts cumulative donations, not individual gifts.