Every fan of the murder mystery genre, among whom I count myself, knows that the satisfactory conclusion of a case requires assembling all the potential culprits to identify three elements that reveal the guilty party among them: the means, the motive and the opportunity for the crime. In our case, is philanthropy guilty of being a plutocratic power grab that promotes donors’ hidden agendas and causes more harm than good? Do philanthropists have the means, motive and opportunity to be revealed as the villains among us?

Do big donors have the means to cause harm?

Clearly the richest philanthropists possess unimaginably vast fortunes, but even the $195 billion wealth of the world's richest individual in early 2021, Jeff Bezos, is a fraction of the annual expenditure of governments such as the US, China, Germany, Japan and France which count their annual expenditure in trillions. Bezos could cover the annual running costs of Denmark or Indonesia for one year, or Ecuador for five years, or one smaller Pacific island for a generation, which is still a startling fact, but easily disproves the possibility of plutocracy. The biggest philanthropic spending in 2020 by an individual was MacKenzie Scott's $5.8 billion distribution. Even if we look only at one area of spending, such as health or education, philanthropists lack the means to compete with either national or state spending (Scott's 2020 giving could just about cover healthcare costs for one year in one small US state such as Wyoming or Hawaii), or global institutions of governance such as the World Health Organization (annual budget in 2020– 21 c.$6 billion) or the World Food Programme (total income in 2019 $8 billion). Private donors can and do make substantial contributions to the success of those programmes but are in no position to take them over or become anywhere near “majority shareholders”. Nor do big donors have any thing like the means to outspend and overpower the wishes of “ordinary” donors.

To take the biggest philanthropy that has existed to date: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has distributed $55 billion in the 20 years since its founding in 2000. That two-decade total is worth less than a quarter of the one-year total of all annual giving in the US, which was $450 billion in 2019 (Giving USA 2020).