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Last night I saw the Warriors trot a bearded rabbi onto the court to blow the shofar, which has nothing to do with Hanukkah, in the 4th quarter to commemorate Jewish Heritage Night. How's your week going?

Discussed in today's email: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Phillips, Larry Page, MacKenzie Scott, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, Eric Schmidt, Brock Pierce and ... Akon. If you haven't yet subscribed, you can do so here to read about the latest moves at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Princeton Club of New York.

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Teddy

The Great Holiday Billionaire Sell-Off

A year-end guide to billionaire gifting, Zuck’s $3 billion stocking stuffer, and the return of Brock Pierce (this time without Akon).

It’s December, which means it’s crunch time for the ultra-wealthy and their menagerie of tax planners, estate lawyers and philanthropic consiglieres to settle their affaires d’etat. The end of the year typically ushers in major offloading of stock by insiders looking to lock in a capital gain (or, if it’s efficient, to harvest a loss). This year has already seen a record $69 billion of stock sales by C.E.O.s, founders and big stakeholders—$20 billion is attributable to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk alone—as billionaires confront the the specter of higher taxes next year, especially in Bezos’ home state of Washington, which just raised its capital-gains rate. 

The holidays are also a time for major charitable gifts and, to be sure, less charitable “gifts.” That’s not just because Christmastime presents are a tradition even for the paupers, but also because it may be time to offset a gain, or to use a donation to avoid realizing one to begin with. The latter “gifts” double as feats of financial engineering by people who need to move money from one bank account to another to comply with various legal strictures. Larry Page, for instance, each holiday season “donates” several hundred million dollars from his foundation to a donor-advised fund, a clever workaround to meet a requirement that a foundation disburse 5 percent of its assets each year. One other billionaire on my mind: Will we see another Medium post in the next few weeks from MacKenzie Scott outlining her own billions of dollars in holiday giving, just like we saw last December? She’s made three such releases to date—two in the summers of 2020 and 2021, one in December 2020. Another year-end disclosure would suggest that these missives have become a tradition of their own, here to repeat biannually for as long as there is cash in the bank.

Chan Zuckerberg’s Holiday Stocking Stuffer

When Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan announced plans for their philanthropy’s science programming back in 2016, it was easy to ridicule the couple’s objective, stated by them aloud in a San Francisco auditorium, to “cure all disease” in their children’s lifetime. The wisecracks about another naive tech billionaire arrived faster than you could say muscular dystrophy, and the philanthropy quickly clarified its aspirations to a slightly more terrestrial level by adding the words “cure, prevent or manage” all disease. 

Those jokes aside, C.Z.I.’s scientific research and investments have arguably produced its most successful, and certainly least controversial, work of the philanthropy’s three main priority areas. Facebook was among the first companies to take Covid seriously in large part because of scientific advice that Zuckerberg was hearing at C.Z.I., a philanthropic journey chronicled in the latest Michael Lewis book, The Premonition.

That’s why it’s worth paying attention to the announcement today that C.Z.I. is pouring $3.4 billion more into scientific research...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT