AI's new millionaires want to disrupt philanthropy. They should fund what already exists
Fortune Lisa Countryman-Quiroz
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
AI’s IPO boom is minting new millionaires fast. The writers say that money should back nonprofits already doing the work, not build a new system.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Lisa Countryman-Quiroz — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
The AI money rush is about to create a lot of very rich people. SpaceX’s IPO this summer is estimated to have made 4,400 new millionaires overnight, and Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to follow. Goldman Sachs is even projecting a historic year for IPO proceeds, with the AI boom doing the heavy lifting.
That raises a blunt question: where does all that wealth go? The argument from Max Simkoff and Lisa Countryman-Quiroz is that it shouldn’t get trapped in tech’s favorite fantasy, the idea that philanthropy needs to be rebuilt from scratch in the image of a startup.
Their case starts with scale. There are 1.8 million nonprofits in the U.S., and they channel roughly $600 billion in charitable giving every year. The sector has already helped tackle huge problems, from eradicating smallpox to lifting more than a billion people out of extreme poverty. And the people running these organizations are not amateurs waiting for tech to rescue them; they’re operators with local knowledge, long relationships, and a history of adapting under pressure.
The best proof, they say, is MacKenzie Scott. Since 2019, she has given more than $26 billion in large unrestricted gifts to existing nonprofits. The Center for Effective Philanthropy studied the results over three years and found that 90% of recipients reported stronger finances, bigger programs, less staff burnout, and more room to innovate. More than a thousand organizations were part of that picture, and the fear that nonprofits couldn’t absorb capital at that scale didn’t hold up.
The authors also point to workforce development, where the pressure is immediate. At JVS Bay Area, they’ve ended job training programs in tech and shifted toward healthcare and the skilled trades, while adding AI skills across all training. Their graduates were still landing meaningful jobs in less than a month on average. The point is simple: there is already a functioning system for moving money into social impact. It just needs more of it.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The tech instinct here is always the same: if something matters, rebuild it until it looks like a pitch deck. That’s usually a good way to waste money and invent a dashboard. The smarter move is boring and older-fashioned — fund the groups that already know how to do the work, and let the billionaires keep their product-launch poetry for somewhere else.
Read more about this at: Fortune
