The Biggest Story in the Billionaire Philanthropy World

Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott
Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Theodore Schleifer
August 17, 2021

Back in the summer of 2019, I received an intriguing and unexpected email from a woman I know named Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School. Madoff, who bears no relation to the disgraced Ponzi-scheming financier, had spent the better part of a decade developing a reputation in academic circles as the country’s most fervent critic of a once-arcane financial vehicle known as the donor-advised fund, or DAF.