Billionaire philanthropy’s growing divide: Mark Zuckerberg vs. Mackenzie Scott giving styles

The split shows a broader divergence in tech philanthropy: one billionaire channeling resources into science and AI infrastructure, the other pouring unrestricted billions into institutions serving communities historically excluded from power and wealth

For more than a decade, FWD.us was a marquee example of Zuckerberg’s attempt to fuse Silicon Valley muscle with Washington policy, pushing immigration and criminal justice reform from the political center.

But in 2025, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) quietly stopped funding FWD.us—its first year without support from Zuckerberg, his wife Priscilla Chan, or their philanthropy—formally ending a relationship that began with a 2013 launch op‑ed and hundreds of millions of dollars in backing, Business Insider reports.

The wind‑down was years in the making: by late 2022, CZI had already begun pivoting away from social advocacy, providing “foundational” funding meant to give FWD.us runway before the partnership ended, and in April 2025, the break was formalized. The timing now reads less like a slow fade than a strategic alignment with Zuckerberg’s rightward political recalibration in the Trump era, as Meta relaxed content rules criticized by conservatives, while the company and its CEO leaned into the new administration.

Zuckerberg bets on science and AI

CZI’s new pitch sounds less like a traditional foundation and more like a research lab: its leadership talks about GPUs, not gala dinners. In November, Zuckerberg and Chan announced that CZI would concentrate on science and AI, doubling down on the Biohub network of biology labs it has funded since 2016 and recruiting researchers with the promise of massive compute power rather than more office space.

Where early CZI grants were scattered across immigration, criminal justice, and education policy, the current strategy funnels capital into building infrastructure—data, tools, and models—that scientists can use for decades. The bet is that by underwriting AI‑enabled biomedical discovery and related fields, CZI can claim long‑horizon, system‑level impact without the political volatility that accompanies hot‑button social debates like border policy or policing.

MacKenzie Scott’s DEI commitment

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is moving in the opposite direction, embracing the very equity agendas many corporations and campuses are backing away from under political pressure. In 2025 alone, she announced roughly $7.1 billion in donations—bringing her total giving since 2019 to more than $26 billion—with a heavy tilt toward historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, Native scholarship providers, and organizations serving low‑income and underrepresented students.

Her recent gifts include $70 million to the United Negro College Fund to build pooled endowments for 37 HBCUs and tens of millions of dollars to Native Forward, the largest scholarship provider for Native students, along with a record $42 million to 10,000 Degrees, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on first‑gen and predominantly non‑white students.

Scott’s model is explicitly trust‑based: large, unrestricted checks, minimal public involvement in governance, and repeat funding for equity‑focused organizations that can demonstrate impact in closing opportunity gaps.

Two models for tech wealth

Zuckerberg and Scott now represent two poles of philanthropy: technocratic infrastructure versus redistributive equity. CZI is building a capital‑intensive platform for science and AI, betting that breakthroughs in biology and computation will ultimately benefit society at scale, even if the pathway is indirect and the beneficiaries diffuse.

Scott, by contrast, has become one of the most visible counterweights to the backlash against DEI, using outsized checks to stabilize and empower institutions led by and serving communities of color, low‑income students, and other marginalized groups.

If CZI’s exit from immigration reform signals that politically exposed advocacy is now a liability for at least one Silicon Valley titan, Scott’s acceleration suggests there is still room—and appetite—for philanthropy that takes sides in the fight over who gets access to power, capital, and education.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.