Steve Jobs - Philanthropist?

Interesting article about Steve Jobs from the New York Times:

Charity doesn't top Apple's tree

STEVE Jobs is a genius. He is an innovator. A visionary. He is perhaps the world's most beloved billionaire. Surprisingly, there is one thing that Jobs is not, at least not yet: a prominent philanthropist.

Despite accumulating an estimated $US8.3 billion ($A7.8 billion) through his holdings in Apple and a 7.4 per cent stake in Disney (through the sale of Pixar), there is no public record of Jobs giving money to charity. He is not a member of Giving Pledge, the organisation founded by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to persuade the nation's wealthiest families to pledge to give away at least half their fortunes. Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.

None of this is meant to judge Jobs. I have long been a huge admirer of Jobs and consider him the da Vinci of our time. Before writing this column, I had reservations about even raising the issue given his ill health, and frankly, because of the enormous positive impact his products have had by improving the lives of millions of people.
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And, of course, it is very possible that Jobs, who has always preferred to remain private, has donated money anonymously or plans to give away his wealth when he dies. (There has long been speculation that an anonymous $US150 million donation to the University of California, San Francisco, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Centre may have come from Jobs.)

His wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, sits on the boards of Teach For America and New Schools Venture Fund, among others, and presumably donates money to those organisations, though neither she nor her husband is listed among its big donors.

But the lack of public philanthropy by Jobs - long whispered about, but rarely said aloud - raises some important questions about the way the public views business and business people at a time that some ''millionaires and billionaires'' are criticised for not giving back enough while others like Jobs are lionised.

Jobs has clearly never craved money for money's sake and has never been ostentatious. He took a $US1 a year salary from Apple before stepping down as chief executive last week, though his stock options have made him billions of dollars. In a 1985 interview with Playboy magazine, he said of his riches: ''You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that's happened to me.''

This makes his lack of public giving all the more curious. At one time, Jobs clearly spent time thinking about philanthropy. In 1986, after leaving Apple and founding NeXT, he started the Steven P. Jobs Foundation. But he closed it a little over a year later. Mark Vermilion, whom Jobs hired away from Apple to run the foundation, said in an interview: ''He clearly didn't have the time.'' Vermilion said Jobs was interested in funding programs for nutrition and vegetarianism, while Vermilion pushed him towards social entrepreneurship. ''I don't know if it was my inability to get him excited about it,'' he lamented. ''I can't criticise Steve.''

Two of his close friends told me that Jobs had said to them in recent years as his wealth ballooned that he could do more good focusing his energy on continuing to grow Apple, especially as he had become ill, than on philanthropy.

''He has been focused on two things - building the team at Apple and his family,'' another friend said. ''That's his legacy. Everything else is a distraction.''

Yet with not many exceptions, most US billionaires have ultimately taken up philanthropy in a public way and helped inspire future generations of charitable giving. And those that haven't have typically come under scrutiny.

Before Bill Gates decided to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to give away their entire fortune, he was often cast as a greedy monopolist. Similarly, critics of Buffett sometimes zinged arrows at him before he announced his plan to give away most of his wealth, using the foundation of his friend Gates to allocate the money. Even after he announced his philanthropic plans, Buffett was criticised for not giving his money away earlier or for not devoting more energy to giving it away himself.

''He gave away 2½¢ for the first 70-some-odd years of his life. He gave away nothing and then in one fell swoop he gave away almost all of his money, thoughtlessly, to one guy,'' hedge fund manager and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt said in a somewhat surprising outburst on CNBC this year. (Steinhardt has long held an inexplicable grudge against Buffett.)

Of course, some wealthy executives give away money, in part, to buff their image - and Jobs has never needed any help in that department.

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, gave a $US100 million challenge grant to the troubled school system in Newark, New Jersey. The donation was made a week before the movie The Social Network was to be released and many speculated, perhaps unfairly, that the donation was timed to blunt any negative repercussions.

And programs like the Giving Pledge have been criticised by some philanthropists as more about getting attention than being selfless.

Jobs, 56, is not alone in his single-minded focus on work over philanthropy. Last year, Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim Helu defended his lack of charity. ''What we need to do as businessmen is to help to solve the problems, the social problems,'' he said on CNBC. ''To fight poverty, but not by charity.''

Jobs's views on charity are unclear because he rarely talks about it. But in 1997, when he returned to Apple, he closed the company's philanthropic programs. He said then that he wanted to restore the company's profitability. Despite the company's $US14 billion profit last year and its $US76 billion cash pile today, the giving programs have never been reinstated.

While many high-growth technology companies have philanthropic arms, Apple does not. It does not have a matching program for charitable giving by its employees like some other Fortune 500 companies. The company did donate $US100,000 in 2008 to a group seeking to block Proposition 8, a ballot measure that would have banned same-sex marriage in California.

But overall, Apple has been one of ''America's least philanthropic companies'', as termed by Stanford Social Innovation Review, a magazine about the non-profit sector.

Still, it is worth noting, and commending, Jobs for his role last year in helping push California to become the first state to create a live donor registry for kidney transplants. Jobs has pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant in 2009 in Memphis, in part because no livers were available in California. A talk Jobs had with California's then first lady, Maria Shriver, led then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to help take up the cause.

Jobs helped introduce the legislation at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital with Schwarzenegger, but that appears to be the last time he publicly advocated on behalf of cancer patients. Unlike Lance Armstrong and other celebrated cancer survivors, Jobs has not used his prominence to promote charitable giving.

In 2006, in a scathing column in Wired, Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain, wrote: ''Yes, he has great charisma and his presentations are good theatre. But his absence from public discourse makes him a cipher. People project their values onto him, and he skates away from the responsibilities that come with great wealth and power.''

Yet Jobs has always been frank about where he has chosen to focus. He told The Wall Street Journal in 1993: ''Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful … that's what matters to me.''

Andrew Ross Sorkin
August 31, 2011
NEW YORK TIMES

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