10 Americans who are not only wealthy but charitable

The 10 wealthiest and most charitable Americans, based on the percentage of wealth donated last year. 

4. Jan Koum

Albert Gea/Reuters/File
WhatsApp Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Jan Koum holds up a mobile phone as he delivers a keynote speech in February, 2014.

In 2009, Jan Koum founded WhatsApp, the world's largest mobile messaging app. Ranking #60 on the Forbes 400, Mr. Koum is worth $7.5 billion. Last year he donated $560 million, or 7.5 percent of his worth, to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to set up a donor-advised fund. His fund issued a grant to FreeBSD, a free open-source operating system project.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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