If you were released from prison because a rich donor funded a project that proved you had been wrongfully convicted, would the shape of that donor's ears be of interest to you? If your elderly parent was able to receive music therapy to ease the distress of dementia, how relevant would the funder's poor fashion sense be? If your disabled child got access to extra interventions that improved her health and happiness, would you care that the services were funded by someone who’d gone through a very messy divorce?

These questions may sound ridiculous but John Arnold, Tom Hunter and MacKenzie Scott have all had aspects of their appearance and private lives raked over in the media in connection to their significant philanthropic efforts. John Arnold, who along with his wife Laura funds the Innocence Project and other successful criminal justice reform projects, was described as having the “jug-eared face of a Division III women's basketball coach” (Arnold 2014). Scotland's first home-grown billionaire, Sir Tom Hunter, who gave £1 million to Music for Dementia and the Alzheimer's Society after losing both his parents to Alzheimer’s, was mocked for wearing “lurid” colours and looking “as if he has been basted in glue and rolled around a branch of Topman” (Caesar 2006). MacKenzie Scott's announcement of her $5.8 billion of giving in 2020 was accompanied in many media articles with reference to her “spectacularly public” divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and her philanthropy was interpreted as “fuck-you money” designed to show up her less philanthropic (so far) ex-spouse (Bryant 2020).

Ad hominem attacks on philanthropists, and assumptions they have disin genuous motives, are longstanding, as shown in Chapter 2. There is nothing new about these kinds of comments, but the rise of populism at the start of the twenty-first century has included a hardening of attitudes towards philanthropy and philanthropists, as charitable giving has become framed as yet another battleground between the will of ordinary people and corrupt or self-serving elites (Lewis 2019).

At root, populism is the denial of complexity, providing satisfying but erroneously simple answers to exceedingly complicated problems. This book argues that philanthropy is far more complex than most people realize, and requires far more nuance than many critics appreciate.